When you believe you don't know what you want
Most of the people I work with don't come to me knowing what they want. They come to me saying the opposite.
"I don't know what I want."
It usually comes with a little embarrassment, because they feel like they should know by now. These are accomplished people. They've built businesses, raised families, led teams. They're the ones everyone else goes to for answers. And then they sit down across from me and say they have no idea what they actually want for themselves.
Here's the thing, though. As a coach, I've never really bought it.
In all the years I've done this work, I've almost never met someone who truly didn't know what they wanted. The wanting is there. Something is just sitting on top of it.
When I really listen, here's what I usually hear underneath those words.
I know what I want, and I'm not ready to say it out loud.
I know what I want, and I'm afraid of what it'll ask of me.
I know what I want, and I can't see how to want it without upending the life I've built around not wanting it.
None of that is not knowing. Every one of them is a knowing they can't quite see yet, or that hasn't felt safe enough to come out. And that's a very different thing.
So when someone tells me they don't know what they want, I'm not worried, and I don't push. Usually I just ask, well, what do you know? And we start there. Not with the big answer, just with whatever they're sure of. The knowing has a way of coming back once it feels safe enough. And making it safe is most of what I do.
Some people seem to move through life without any of that weight, knowing exactly who they are and what they want, and living like it. Most of us aren't built that way, or at least it doesn't come that easily. But the rest of us can find our way back too. The wanting didn't go anywhere. It's been here the whole time, waiting for us to feel safe enough to claim it.
So if some version of "I don't know" has been following you around for a while, I'll say to you what I say to them. You're probably not as lost as you feel. What you're looking for isn't missing. And you don't have to wait for someday to go find it.
Something to sit with or journal about: what might you already know that you haven't let yourself say out loud yet?