Better Life: Do You REALLY Know What You Want?

Our lives are filled with choices.

No matter where you are, or what you're doing, chances are you're constantly having to choose between one thing or another.

The more things we're exposed to, the more we decide that we want certain things in life. This can be anything from a specific meal for dinner, to a holiday, to a car, to certain attributes in a spouse or life partner.

The problem is that we often decide that we want certain things without really understanding what it is we truly want. That is to say, our wants are superficial and based on things that actually turn out to not be very important, in the long run... even though they seem really important.

I sometimes think about a young friend of mine who was absolutely certain that what she wanted after she got out of University was a yellow VW Beetle. It was the only car that would do.

Now, she had never actually driven a yellow — or any kind of — VW beetle, let alone even been a passenger in one! As such, we could look at her situation and quickly determine that her want was purely conceptual rather than functional.

Although insisting on wanting this yellow VW Beetle might eventually turn into a pretty expensive mistake, such things are more readily corrected when you're dealing with items, as opposed to when you're dealing with persons.

In my counseling practice, this is something I often run into with clients who come to me with relationship troubles and often lead with the sentence "but I thought this person was going to be this way and that way."

When we take a little time to unpack that situation and examine it in depth it often turns out that the person did turn out to be exactly that way, but that these wants were ultimately conceptual wants that had little to do with the person's actual emotional well-being, as well as the ability to have a fulfilling relationship.

Part of the problem is that we often don't pause long enough to truly know ourselves and what makes us happy before we make choices that allegedly are supposed to make us happy.

It's a bit like insisting that you want "that mansion on the hill in the city, because doesn't everybody want a mansion on the hill?" when — in fact — what truly makes your inner self happy is to have a cozy cottage hidden away in a somewhat rural area.

It's easy to reach for the standard answer and say that "it's just because we are too stuck in ego", but ego or not, unless we truly understand ourselves well enough to know what makes us happy, ego doesn't really cause that much disruption.

It often surprises me — and alarms me a little — how many people quite simply have never done enough introspective work to understand their true needs as they exist separately from their conceptual needs that come in from what friends and family and greater society tells them, and pressures them to prefer.

I'm not suggesting the two can't be the same, but we need to at least examine ourselves well enough to know what is real and what is just a flight of fancy.

Getting back to relationships, we often form them based on attributes we think are important but that are somewhat disconnected from what we would discover really were important if we took the time to look away from the superficial.

And to do that, we must first know ourselves well enough to determine what we really want!

Thanks for visiting my page and Bright Blessings to all!

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