Supercoach - Michael Neill [34]
The kind of wanting I’m referring to here comes from the heart and from the spirit. It’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s pure. It’s not a craving, and it’s not a need. It’s just a want—something that you’re drawn toward and would welcome into your life. This is the kind of desire that if you learn to listen to it, follow it, and even surrender to it will guide you to a life more wonderful than you can ever imagine.
While this simple (but by no means easy) formula has led my clients, students, and me into ever-higher realms of both inner and outer success, I’ve also noticed that those people who resist following their own joyful guidance as a way of being in the world have many variations of one basic concern:
“If I just did what I wanted all day long,
I’d never get anything ‘important’ done.”
Navigating by Desire
This week, before deciding on any course of action, ask yourself, “Do I want to?”
Wherever possible, allow your answer to influence your decision and guide your choice.
Do this irrespective of whether or not you’re “in the mood.” If you do, you’ll notice that your mood will begin to change “all by itself.”
Although I know from experience that this isn’t true in practice, I can see that in theory it seems as though it should be true. After all, not many people wake up in the morning thinking, “You know what I’d love to do today? I’d love to do the laundry and feed the kids before taking the car in to the garage on my way to a job I’m only doing because it pays the bills! Whoo-hoo!”
But what often resolves this apparent conflict for my clients is when I explain the difference between navigating by desire and navigating by mood:
• Navigating by desire means you base your decisions about what to do or not do on the question “Do I want to?” If the answer is “yes,” you do your best to move forward; if the answer is “no,” you do your best to stay put.
• Navigating by mood, on the other hand, is when you attempt to base your decisions on the answer to the question “Do I feel like it?” If you don’t feel like doing something, you put it off until later; if you do feel like it, you move forward.
While at first these two ways of making decisions seem similar, they take people in two completely different directions. Since our moods are often tied up in old habits and patterns of thinking (more on this in Session Five), following them tends to just create more of the “same old, same old” in our lives. Somehow, we just don’t get around to making those changes we know we’d love to make and things that seem as though they’ll take too much effort are put off until the last minute or aren’t done at all.
Wanting, however, is a living, breathing, fluid process. Each time you do what you want (or don’t do what you don’t want), your actions seem effortless, and inspired ideas become almost commonplace. Over time, it becomes easier and easier to read and follow your inner compass. Life gets a lot simpler, and the pursuit of success becomes a lot more fun.
The Wisdom of Common Sense
There is a very old joke about a man who goes to a doctor.
“Doctor,” the man says, attempting to lift his arm over his head, “it hurts when I do this.”
The doctor looks at him sagely and says, “Don’t do it!”
This kind of common sense/innate wisdom approach to life is nearly always available to us, but we spend so much of our time caught up in the whirlwind of our thoughts that we don’t notice it. And even when we do notice it, we’ll often ignore it, hoping that our intellect can find a different answer more in keeping with what we hope will turn out to be true.
I was explaining this idea in a meeting with a potential corporate client one day when one of the women in the room asked for an example. I went with the first one that popped into my head—that nearly every woman I’ve talked to who has come out the other side of a bad marriage has told me that she knew not to marry the guy at some point before