I know what I most want. Do you?

Many of us believe we know what we want. In my experience coaching high achievers and ‘successful’ executives, many of us know what other people want for us. What we truely want for ourselves and from ourselves, can take a little more work to uncover.

Around the turn of the year, my wife asked me what I wanted from the year ahead. The list she captured of my immediate responses was this;

• To help in a global sense.
• To become a better version of myself
• To not be exhausted.
• To not be chronically stressed.
• To be able to spend more time with my children.
• To have a comfortable income.
• To not to sell people crap they don’t need.
• To make a difference and feel good about the work I am doing because I know what it is for.

Not a bad start. After some reflection though, here’s what I really want...

To help the broken to mend,

The lonely to connect,

To solidify passion into purpose,

To make the brilliant dazzling,

To enable to timid to be bold,

To provoke the great to do good,

And to find means to unite all for just long enough

to never want to be divided again.

How does that sound to you?

Do you share any of these wants?

It’s taken me 40 years of life, 9 years of marriage, 29 years of work, 14 years as a migrant in a land far from where I was born and the provocative inquiry of a mob of coaches, mentors and friends to build the perspective that allowed me to chose this list of wants.

In a way ironically, I feel like it’s been a circular motion that has brought me here. I once heard Jane Fonda say,

I started off brave and decent, and it took me a long time to get back there.

I think that comment nicely sums up the journey I’ve been on to create the clarity I feel I now have over what I want most.

I hope reading this will have been of some use, and may have induced some reflection or stimulated a little internal debate.

I’ll leave you where I began…

I know what I most want. Do you?