Focus on How You Want to Feel, Not What You Want to Achieve

How to remove the emotional blocks standing between you and your life’s work.

The usual goal setting advice is to focus on measurable timelines and results. This approach can be useful, but it’s incomplete.

Instead of focusing solely on the tactics, strategies, and precise, concrete details of my ideal career, I’ve decided to focus on the emotions I want to feel as I work.

Those emotions are ease, fulfillment, and fun.

While I have a general idea of what I want to be doing, I’m accessing more clarity and confidence as I focus on how I want to feel.

By attending to my emotional experience, I avoiding falling into the trapdoor of assuming that outer circumstances can fundamentally change my internal landscape.

And at the same time, by knowing how I want to feel, I can look for optimizations to conjure those feelings in the present, even before my ideal career takes shape.

The Hidden Staircase into Clarity Most People Overlook

When I first became obsessed with creating an ideal career, I focused heavily on external details: what I’d do to make money, the amount I wanted to make, etc.

As I gained momentum, I didn’t feel excited. Instead, I found justifications for feeling the exact ways I felt before my goals came anywhere close to materializing.

Instead of worrying about how I’d get what I wanted, I’d wonder if I’d be able to live up to my clients’ expectations. I’d worry about losing momentum, and so on.

I realized: no matter our circumstances, it’s always possible to feel nervous, disappointed, or otherwise unfulfilled.

Now, I’m not implying that making more money or finding more satisfying work can’t genuinely improve our lives.

But when we agonize over the external details of what we want (i.e. the how and the what), we’re forgetting we always bring ourselves and our baggage to new circumstances.

If you focus on the externals and bypass the inner work, you’ll bring the same consciousness that generated your dissatisfying circumstances into a new reality.

Forget What You Want to Do: How Do You Want to Feel?

1. Ask yourself: “What do I really want? What circumstances would make my life feel like an eternal vacation?”
2. When you’ve identified your ideal circumstances, reverse engineer them. What emotions would you feel if those circumstances were already yours? Write them down on a note you can continually glance at throughout the day.
3. As you work on your current tasks, ask, “How can I do this so it feels fun, easy, and fulfilling? (Replace these with your desired emotions.)” (Note: This will get you in the habit of conjuring emotions internally, rather than waiting for your circumstances to draw them out. The fun game is this: as you conjure your ideal emotions more regularly, the more likely you are to tap into circumstances that naturally draw them out.)
4. If you’re looking for new types of work, keep your ideal feelings in mind as you look for new clients or new positions, letting them guide your decision-making.

Ask these Questions to Dissolve Resistance, Fear, and other Emotional Blocks

This questioning process frees you from that classic conundrum of building something up in your head only to find that it actually sucks.

It’s human nature to believe our circumstances can fundamentally change our emotional states. While it’s true to a certain extent, it’s severely limited. The emotions we habitually feel run deep.

If you regularly feel bored, worried, or otherwise discontent, rest assured: those emotions will hunt you down. It’s only a matter of time before the thrill of fresh circumstances wear off, and you’ll find justifications for feeling those emotions again.

The antidote is to prioritize how you feel above what you’re doing.

Ask how you want to feel, and train yourself to conjure those emotions from within. To do this, look for small ways to feel better in the present moment.

These might be micro-optimizations that make you feel more comfortable: Bringing your work to a park, sitting under trees, drinking hot cinnamon maple tea, or whatever raises your mood.

Or they can be larger re-frames: You might ask, “How is this circumstance secretly perfect for me?” “Why will I look back and be thankful for this in five years?”

As Tony Robbins wrote in Awaken the Giant Within, questions are the answers. We get stuck, depressed, and tense when we limit ourselves with constricting, dead-weight interpretations.

But when you ask the right questions, you access a lightness that helps you naturally release emotional blocks.

As you practice focusing on your emotions and conjuring them from within, your circumstances will gradually shift to align with and justify those feelings.

And eventually, you won’t need to work as hard to conjure your ideal emotions internally. You’ll have designed a lifestyle built on emotions first (instead of the illusion that outer world circumstances can shape how we feel above our relationships with ourselves).

Do you consider yourself the victim of your fate or the author of it?

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We’ll explore esoteric and Jungian-inspired perspectives on making your own fate: Shadow work, life scripts analysis, and other tools that can help you befriend your inner victim and release old patterns that no longer serve you.