Many of us have taken up the habit of writing down our long-term goals, hoping we’ll direct our unconscious minds to accomplish them and they’ll manifest in the world. Unfortunately, as with New Year’s resolutions, this technique often doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Many of us are disappointed at the end of each year by the number of goals we didn’t get around to checking off our list.
I’ve come to believe one of the reasons for this is that we often base our lists of goals on what we’re convinced that we “should” want, rather than what we actually want. In other words, we’re setting our goals based on what our parents, culture, and other influences expect us to want, as opposed to our genuine desires.
For example, although you might really want to be a sculptor, you may have been taught that you “should” want a stable, respectable career in accounting. Although you may actually prefer being single, you may have been pressured by your family, friends, and others into believing you “should” get married. These “shoulds,” as they’re sometimes called, don’t really inspire us—we’re only pursuing them to get others’ approval and thus we don’t find ourselves strongly motivated to achieve them.
One tricky aspect of our “shoulds” is that they’re often difficult to tell apart from our authentic wants. We often learn what others expect us to want very early on, and those ideas become so deeply ingrained in us that we actually convince ourselves, on a conscious level, that we want them. For instance, I worked with one woman who, as a child, aspired to be a painter, but her parents told her she lacked artistic talent. For years, she felt unsafe telling people what she really wanted, or even acknowledging it to herself.
Our unconscious minds seem to know the difference between our real wants and “should wants,” and can block our efforts to reach a goal we’re not actually passionate about. But how can we become aware, on a conscious level, of what we deeply, truly desire? In coaching people on finding direction in their careers, I’ve found three approaches helpful, and I’ll share them here.
