6 Journal Prompts To Get Clear On What You Really Want

Alex Turner
10 min readOct 3, 2019
Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash

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.

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