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6 Journal Prompts To Get Clear On What You Really Want
Don’t Do This
When trying to answer the question of what they most want, many people like to start out with the exact opposite. Make a list of what you don’t like and don’t want in your life.
Personally, I don’t like this approach. Not because I’m an unwavering optimist — it’s because it’s a purple elephant situation. Remember, don’t think about a purple elephant!
If you focus on the purple elephant — that’s what you’ll see. The brain can’t really differentiate between do and don’t, can and can’t. It’s basic, y’all.
So if you focus on what you don’t want, you could just end up bringing about more of that into your life. It also gets you in a funk listing out all the things that might be not so satisfactory or are going wrong in your life — and I just think that’s not the optimal state to cultivate in order to get perspective on what you do want.
Hope over fear, mmmmkay?
You need to be in a dreaming state.
You need to be in a “what the f- is possible” kind of state.
It’s very different to be in a dreaming-thinking-creative place for this task — not stuck in the FML mud.
So, what we’re contending with here is that it’s not that people don’t know what they want, it’s that they can’t choose between them. So they feel the potential to be pulled in all directions, that there are millions of things swarming around in their mind and in their imagination as to what they want, and it can be pretty overwhelming.
The easiest way to handle that then is to just not go there.
But if you, brave soul, do want to go there, the key to this task is actually about getting that all down on paper where you can physically sort it out, and then can start the monumental (I mean fun, I promise) task of prioritising a few select ones — those that will actually move the needle.
Do This.
Here are six of my favourite journal prompts that I use to check in with what I want for life and for my business: