HOW TO STOP GRINDING YOURSELF DOWN BY METICULOUSLY ANALYSING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, AND WHAT YOU CAN START DOING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU DO WANT
During my “Discovery Calls” (the calls with those who want to start the BACK TO YOURSELF journey with me), I often talk with people who remind me a lot of myself a few years ago, when I was lost, looking for a new professional path aligned with who I was.
Being for a long time in a job where you feel like your days don’t “make sense”, you develop a new skill: you become a black belt in talking about what you don’t like and what’s not working in your life.
So when I ask questions about the current situation people might talk for hours!! But it’s a different matter when I ask them: “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”.
They stop, take some time, and start with something like: “oh.. this is a good question”.. “a different job”, or “I want to feel better”.
But, what do you expect from a “different job”? What does “feeling better” mean?
Sometimes you got so far from yourself that you don’t know how to answer that question, it’s been too long since you’ve asked yourself seriously what it takes to make YOU (and not just others) happy.
That’s why getting to a first rudimentary definition of what s/he wants, brings already a feeling of lightness, a starting point of having a direction. And this awakens a bit the lost fire of enthusiasm.
HOW CAN YOU GET STARTED?
By creating a mix between a small trip in the future seasoned with a lot of pragmatism: assume we’ve been working together and you call me a year from now. You are excited and satisfied because you have achieved the change you wanted! What has happened at that time? what are you excited about? what has changed? what did you manage to achieve?
Describe it to me as if it’s already happened, use details, see it, feel it, smell it as if it happened.
Here’s where “I don’t want this job”/I want to feel differently, turns into more details:
I want to wake up in the morning and be excited about what I have to do
I want to have a clear understanding of what activities and situations give me energy and make me feel satisfied
I want to have started a new training
I want to have time just for myself twice a week
I want to have art projects with other artists
Do you see? It starts to take shape
WHAT DO YOU GET
You shift your focus
From passive you become active
You create the first prerequisite to get what you’re looking for
Is it enough to take just this one step to have a well-defined goal?
Of course not.
Don’t fall into the trap of wanting to define it all in detail right away, because you’ll get exactly the opposite effect: paralysis.
Defining a goal properly is a piece of a long journey to go BACK TO YOURSELF. You can’t have it all in one move, but you can choose to make the first important step to get out of the cage of complaining, (which takes away your ability to take action to be happy), and start exploring what’s out there for you!
And you? Has your time come to discover what you want? giada.varvello@gmail.com
