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WITI PERSONAL GROWTH
The Number One Reason You Don't Get What You Want
You are not getting what you want in your life - in your career or in your personal relationships - but you don't know why, and it is making you feel frustrated, angry and just plain stuck. You are clueless as to what is getting in your way and wish there was a simple answer and a simple fix. From my perspective as a Coach I can tell you that there is no lack of interesting and sometimes esoteric things that might be getting in your way - I have personally witnessed and researched over 200 specific things that get and keep people stuck. Let me share with you the number one reason I have found why most people don't get what they want, and give you some tools to get around it.
Lack of clarity about what you really want is the number one reason you won't get what you want. Before you can attract, create or manifest anything you have to know what it is. Sounds simple - but in reality it is not. There are all kinds of interesting traps that keep you from knowing what you want and being able to go after it. Trap #1: Emotions Rule Emotions are a fact of life. They usually come unbidden to color all of our experiences. Sometimes our emotions are positive - sometimes negative. It is interesting that although we don't spend a lot of time analyzing WHY we feel certain emotions in particular situations, we are more than willing to let our emotions drive our thoughts and actions in an almost knee-jerk response. You will not be able to get clear on what you really want if you let your emotions rule your thoughts. Unfortunately we often get trapped in a sequence that looks like this: an event occurs (stimulus), we have an emotional reaction to it (positive or negative) and then we respond. What most people don't realize is that between the stimulus, their emotion, and their response is another important step. The real sequence is as follows: event (stimulus) - INTERPRETATION - emotional reaction - and then response. In the intensity of the moment you will tend to breeze right by the "interpretation step," blissfully unaware that there might be many possible interpretations of what just happened and that other responses and actions might serve you better than the ones you are currently rushing to take. Here is a simple example to illustrate the point. Let's suppose at work you hear about a new project that requires a temporary assignment in France. You think to yourself, "I will be perfect for the job and I am sure my boss will recognize that I have the right set of skills and experience to excel at the task." Next day, your boss announces that he is giving the job to someone else - and even worse - he is giving it to someone you feel has been trying to usurp you position (i.e., your "enemy"). Your mental interpretations of the situation start flying fast and furious - "My boss must be oblivious to my skills and talents; my enemy has succeeded in poisoning my boss's mind against me; when my enemy returns from France he will be 'in favor' with upper management and I will likely be out of a job." Based on these interpretations the emotions show up - you feel a combination of disappointment, stress, anger, and fear and these emotions drive your thoughts about what you "want." Believe it or not, it is not that unusual for people in similar situations to the one I just described to convince themselves that what they really want to do is QUIT - immediately - before they get fired. The lesson of Trap #1 is as follows: To get what you really want you first need to stop letting your emotions drive your thoughts. And the tool you can use to gain control in these types of situations is called "Pause." You use it as follows: insert it in the stimulus-response cycle as follows: Event (stimulus) then "Pause." Don't let your interpretations occur unconsciously - make them explicit - and force yourself to actively explore alternative positive interpretations that might also be true and would serve you better than the negative ones that flash immediately to mind. In the above scenario it never occurred to the women living through it that her boss made a conscious decision to keep her stateside so that she would be available for a critically important strategic project he envisioned would unfold within the next month (the actual true circumstance). Once an erroneously negative interpretation is made in a situation your emotions get triggered and it is impossible to be clear about what you really want. Trap #2: Getting stuck in generalities is really easy Thinking about what you "really want" takes lots of work because there are many factors to consider. The second key trap in discovering what you really want is allowing yourself to be satisfied with generalities. When you are explicitly clear on what you want it is relatively easy to uncover the steps to get your there. If you settle for generalities the next steps remain invisible. Here are three specific ways that generalities keep you stuck and how to avoid them. You never get further than defining your desired "end state" When you ask people what they want they will often answer with descriptions of "end states." For example, "I want to be happy; I want to be in control; I want to be less stressed." Unfortunately, simply articulating these end states is almost useless in helping you get what you want - unless you are willing to go a lot further in your thinking. It's a long way from saying "I want to be happy" to really getting explicit about what "happy" really means to you (secure? calm? in control? fulfilled? inspired?, etc.), and what situations and environments will be necessary for you to feel this way. You need to look at the act of defining your desired "end states" as the beginning of your process of defining what you want - not the end. You don't know how to draw key distinctions To get really clear about what you want you need to be wiling to continuously draw finer and finer distinctions. Here is a simple example. You say, "I want to buy a shirt," so you go to a clothing store with that thought in mind. Unfortunately this "vague idea" about what you want is not going to get you very far. To translate that desire into action you need to be willing to make some more detailed distinctions - do you want a dress shirt or a casual shirt? Long sleeved or short? What colors do you like? What fabric? What style? What exactly is the shirt for? Where do you intend to wear it? Etc. The same process is true when you "want" a new job or a new relationship. You need to be willing and able to explore making finer and finer distinctions about the attributes of what you really want. I worked with one coaching client who was employed as a writer/editor who told me that she hated editing and didn't want that to be part of what she did in her next job. However, upon deeper discussion it turned out that she actually loved certain parts of editing - she loved editing for content and feel - she just did not like editing for punctuation and sentence structure. Making this distinction was key to finding the next career move that suited her perfectly. You have no criteria for deciding what you want When it comes to making decisions about what they want many people resort to subjecting themselves to an endless array of binary choices - Do I want this or that? Do I want to be a software programmer or an architect? Would I be happier in real estate or interior design? The comparisons are apples and oranges and cannot be easily traded off. To avoid the endless loop of these binary comparisons here is what you need: an independent set of criteria by which to judge the suitability of each option you come across. And these criteria need to come from an understanding of who you are and how you work best, and they need to be specific. Then and only then can you look at evaluating the options - not against each other - but against the criteria - to see what would be the best fit. Trap #3: It's hard to image the future accurately Most of us think that a great way to figure out what we really want is to image it - to mentally play out a future situation or relationship - and see how it makes us feel. And we tend to feel very confident that such imaginings provide us good solid evidence of what might make us happy in the future. Unfortunately, research shows that humans are in fact not good at all in predicting what will make them happy in the future. In a fascinating book called Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert explores all of the quirks of human perception that explain why our predictions about what would make us happy in the future are so lousy. One of the most fascinating reasons is that because predictions about the future are made in the present they are inevitably influenced by the present. It turns out that the way we feel right now and the way we think now exert an unusually strong influence on the way we think we will feel in the future. This is one reason why people who are experiencing emotions associated with traumas in the present (e.g., the stress, sadness, or sense of loss or bitterness associated with a divorce or job loss) are unable to fully "imagine" how they will feel any different in the future. They fail to recognize that their future selves won't see the world as they see it now. Thus, to discover what you really want you need to understand the shortcomings of imagining the future. Since mental predictions are not very reliable sometimes it is better to run fast, low-investment "experiments" in the present to gain feedback about how you might actually feel in a given situation as opposed to just imagining it. In Summary We all deserve to get what we really want in life. But to make it happen we need to be willing to "do the work." In my experience the most important step is getting clear on what you want - because if you don't know what you want you can't make the leap from thought to action. And the key to getting the necessary clarity is to avoid the traps that can derail you: letting your emotions rule, getting stuck in generalities, and believing that you can imagine the future accurately.
What is your point of view? Please post your thoughts on the discussion board.
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