I don't know what I want anymore

I spent about a decade building a life where I could do what I wanted, when I wanted, from wherever I wanted. And I got it. Remote income, nobody to report to, weeks where more money came in than I knew what to do with.

Then I had the time and no idea how to fill it. I sat in it for a while and went back to distracting myself, because that at least was something to do.

It took me years to work out which part had gone missing. It wasn't the money and it wasn't the freedom and it wasn't the plan. The plan was fine. The plan was somebody else's, which I'll come back to. What had gone was the wanting.

Why nothing comes when somebody asks what you want

You have been practising a different question for a very long time. What is going wrong, what needs sorting, what everybody around you needs this week. Ask for any of that and you could go all day without pausing. Then the question turns and points at you and there is genuinely nothing there.

I run an exercise on this and the same thing happens nearly every time:

Most people are professionals, really dialled in on what they don't want. And every time I ask, okay, well that's what you don't want, what do you want instead, it trips off a lot of people.

Daniel Lawson

You are fluent in what you don't want, and out of practice at the other one. Those are two different skills and only one of them gets used.

I found the edge of my own version of this sitting with a coach who asked me what I valued in a relationship. I gave him trust, honesty, respect, loyalty. He said, with respect, those are baselines. If you don't have those you don't have a relationship at all. What's uniquely important to you?

And I went blank. Sat there with a coffee going cold in front of me and had no idea.

What I don't know usually means

It usually means you got asked about your whole life. What do you want. Nobody can answer that one, because there's nothing to take hold of in it, so nothing comes back.

A group member had been running a well known goal-setting method at night, the one where you write the result first and then the actions under it. They could not fill in the first box. Their words were that they didn't know what their objectives were anymore, because they had been so focused on doing, doing, doing.

The doing was working fine and it never stopped for a second. It was the box above it that was empty.

That's what makes this one so disorienting. Everything else about you is working. You are the person who gets asked, who gets relied on, who gets it done. And then a regular question comes at you and produces nothing at all, and it feels like a fault in you rather than a skill you stopped using.

Where the wanting went

Mine went early and I can still see it.

Every time I asked my mum for something as a kid, there's a part of me that remembers the disappointment on her face. It was a single-mother house and there wasn't much money in it. Just enough for the things we needed and nothing spare. So when I asked for something on top of that it wasn't there to give, and she felt that, and I watched her feel it. So I stopped asking, and I got very good at not needing anything.

Many of us do a version of that, and then we forget we ever wanted anything. That's the sequence. You stop asking first, and the forgetting comes later and for free.

The versions I hear now are all the same shape underneath.

One participant said they don't fight for things anymore, they just gave up. What they gave up on was never the thing itself. It was the wanting, and they had been calling it harmony for years.

Another put it as not having a direct line to what you want, because there are always other people to consider on the way to it. By the time you've routed a want through everyone it touches, it doesn't look like yours anymore.

A third described shutting the thought down before it had finished forming. Told themselves there was nothing there for them, without ever having looked. Coming back to it later, they said the thing they'd been calling realism was fear.

So what do we do instead

Three things, and all of them are smaller than the problem sounds.

One. Ask it at a size you can answer. Ask it for the next month, the next two months, this quarter. What are you going for, and what's the first thing that comes. Then go again on whatever showed up: what's the specific want inside that. Then once more: what's the want inside that for you, rather than for everyone who leans on you. One participant described it as taking a wall down step by step, and that's about right. The first answer is nearly always the group's answer. The third one tends to be yours.

Two. Write one down every day with nothing attached to it. A group member keeps a line at the bottom of their journal, every day, underneath the gratitude and the intentions: I want what I want. No plan bolted onto it, no case built for why it's reasonable, no checking whether it's available. Just the wanting, on its own, for its own sake. Do that for a year and you have 365 of them, and they get bigger as you go, because the muscle comes back.

Three. Say one of them to somebody who could say no. This is the one that does the work, and it's the one everybody skips.

A want nobody could refuse is a preference. It costs nothing and proves nothing. The one that counts has a person on the other end of it who might decline, which is why we route around it and provide something instead. I still catch myself doing the swap. Somebody could be asked for something and instead I go and build the thing, or offer them something of mine, and the want I started with never gets said. It looks generous from the outside. From the inside it's a way of keeping the answer off the table.

Common questions

What if I do all that and still come up empty?

Then you say so. A group member answered a direct question with I don't know that answer, didn't sugar coat it, and that was a better session than any invented answer would have produced. Not knowing is a real position and it's workable. Pretending to know is the one that stalls.

Isn't this just goal setting?

Goal setting starts after this. Every method you have tried assumes there is something in the first box, and this is the problem of the first box being empty. That's why the productivity version of the answer bounces off you, because you can already execute. Execution was never what was missing.

I know exactly what I want for my family and my work. Why can't I do it for myself?

Because those wants have a legitimate reason attached and yours has to stand up on its own. A want for somebody else comes pre-justified, so it's allowed through. Wanting a thing because you want it, with no case underneath it, is the version that got shut down early, and it's the one worth practising.

How long before it comes back?

Longer than you would like and less time than you'd fear. The honest answer is that it moves when you start using it and not before, and the first small want you name and say to another person does more than a month of thinking it over.

What if what I want is unreasonable?

Then it's still information. Most of us have a stack of blockers sitting on top of wanting anything at all, and the reasonableness test is one of the heaviest. Want it on paper first. You can decide what to do about it afterwards, and you will be deciding with something in front of you rather than a blank.

If this is you

The part you cannot do alone is the check. You can name a want in your own head all week and never find out whether it's yours or the one you inherited, because there is nobody there to say no to it. The wanting only becomes real at the point where somebody could turn it down and you say it anyway.

That's what the group does that the journal can't. There's a person there who might decline, and there's somebody watching who catches the shift in you when you ask, a few seconds before you notice it yourself.

The Reconnected Man. The Reconnected Woman.