What’s your relationship to wanting and dreaming?

During the first weekend of January, I hosted a workshop to support people in slowing down to honour and complete their year and to consciously create their new year. Part of the process of consciously creating your new year, is to allow yourself to dream about what you would like to create.

Whenever I’m in conversation with a new person, I invite them to dream. I invite them to consider what they want. For some peole, it’s easy to know what they want. They find it easy to dream. And for others, knowing what they want, knowing the longing of their own heart, feels unreachable or impossible. The experiences of their past are so painful, or they have fallen into pleasing others and morphing themselves into whatever they think others want them to be, so much so, that they lose their sense of who they are and what they want.

I remember a time in my life when I was so busy adapting who I was being to try and be more loveable or acceptable to others, that I had no sense of who I was. During those times, I found it hard to dream. I found it hard to even begin to know what I wanted outside of asking others’ opinions about what they thought I should want.

Recently, my coach Amber Krzys, shared an email with the title What’s your relationship to wanting? And that got me thinking about why it’s easy for some to know what they want, and hard for others. And my sense is that it has a lot to do with how often you were allowed to express your wants and needs. As a child, I was often shut down when I wanted to express myself or ask for what I needed. I also learnt that my needs were considered a bother or a burden, or my parents would tell me that I didn’t really know what I wanted. And so, over time, I stopped checking in with myself, because I didn’t trust that I actually really knew what I wanted. I learnt to suppress my own longings.

And yet, my longings would keep popping up in the silent crevices of my mind. From time to time, I would catch myself longing for something different. And I remember in a therapy session once, my therapist asked me what had kept me going during the darkest years of my childhood. What had me continue to work hard and move forward? I said, I think I always knew deep down that things could be different. There was a part of me that believed that I could have a different life.

And today I know that that was my own Inner Wisdom guiding me. I didn’t know it back then. I also know that I got a lot of my resilience from my father. I have watched him reinvent and recreate himself many times over the years and it’s one of the things I admire most about him. He never gives up. He always gets up and tries again. And I have that strength too.

There is one other critical ingredient needed though. Resilience needs to be combined with an ownership mindset. If I choose to take full ownership of my life and happiness, I get to create whatever I want, because I choose. No-one else does. And see, this is the tricky part, because in order to choose, I need to give myself permission to want and to dream. Otherwise, how will I know what I want to create? Not having a dream or a longing for yourself, makes it hard to co-create with life.

In February last year, I attended the Co-Active Leadership Experience, and in that course, the course leaders invited us all to consider what we long or yearn for. And they invited us to consider our longings on different levels. What you long or yearn for, for yourself, for your family and community, and for the world?

A longing is a yearning or desire. It’s a want. It’s what you would like to see happen. Some of us have longings for ourselves and our families, and some of us have longings for our worlds – things we hope to see transpire in our world. In that course, they invited each of us to share at least one of our longings, and when you shared your longing with the group, they would respond with, “Never stop yearning. I believe that you can have what you yearn for and lead it”.

That sentence had such a powerful impact on me. I remember bursting into tears because no-one had ever said that to me before. No-one had ever invited me to keep yearning or even to want or long in the first place. That sentence opened up my heart in ways that I didn’t know I had closed myself off until that moment. And there was something about adding “and lead it”, to the end of the sentence, that invited ownership into the equation. Yearning is not passive and actionless. Yearning is active. It requires YOU to lean into your yearning and live in a way that has YOU create the thing you want to see in the world.

One of my favourite quotes has always been Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “BE the change you want to see in the world.” And now I get it at a much deeper level. Whatever I yearn for, I get to create it, by being that in the world. It always starts with me, because it’s the only thing I have full control over – myself. And any change you are longing for, starts with YOU. You can BE the change you long to see in the world. YOU can lead it.

In her email, Amber Krzys shared that there are three ways that you can choose to be with wanting. The first option is to demand that you get what you want. This approach has a rigidness and a really tight grip to it – very much like when you are on a roller coaster, and you are gripping really tight to the handlebars – so much so that your knuckles start turning white. Gripping so tightly inevitably has the outcome that your hands get tired, and you lose your grip.

When we are so rigid in our approach, we are basically trying to control things that are not in our control, and yet ultimately, we do not control the outcome. We can have the yearning and the longing. We can set the goals. We can have clear intentions. And take the steps towards the goals. And ultimately, we do not control the outcome.

In her beautiful book, What if this Is the Fun Part? Carolyn Freyer-Jones shares a conversation she once had with her coach, Steve Chandler. She asked him what to do if things didn’t turn out the way she wanted, or if she didn’t get what she wanted, and I loved Steve’s response to her. He said, “Well that’s great, because then you learn that you don’t need it.”

Steve’s response in that moment was truly profound. Often in life, we don’t get what we want. We always get what we need though. And it can be soul crushing to not get what we want. So, considering that what I gain from not getting what I want, is that I discover that I don’t really need it for my own personal joy and fulfillment, is fantastic news. It means freedom from anything that I think I need in order to be happy.

The second option we have in our relationship to wanting, is that we can wait to be told by life/God/a higher power. This places the responsibility for creation firmly out of your own hands. It essentially means you are always waiting for signs from the universe or God to figure out what you should be doing. This approach leaves the impression that you have no real say in the matter. So, essentially it removes any sense of agency you may have thought you had.

I remember a friend of mine many years ago choosing her husband that way. She let God decide who she would marry, by marrying the first man she met at church who said he wanted to marry her. At the time, that felt truly absurd to me. Amber Krzys shares that she realised that this approach would be similar to asking her husband what he thinks she should be doing with her time. It’s essentially relinquishing control of your life over to forces outside yourself, and it can leave you feeling powerless.

Amber also shares that this approach basically says you have no wants of your own and that you are waiting to receive guidance and then take action from there. She said she told herself she was being a “good spiritual student” by following this approach. What she didn’t realise until much later was that she had a judgment running on the inside that wanting something for yourself was egoic and bad. It was selfish and self-directed, instead of outer-directed. So, unconsciously she was stopping herself from wanting, because she believed that that would make her a bad person, or a less spiritual person.

In my mind, this feels like a Victim approach to life, because I then get to blame Life or God or someone else if something doesn’t turn out the way I had wanted it to turn out. And, I’m also not taking any ownership in co-creating what I want. I’m leaving it up to chance.

Not wanting for myself, can also lead to resentment. I’ve seen it happen so often for my clients. When they don’t check in with themselves about their own wants and needs, or they don’t allow themselves to even have wants and needs, they end up resenting the very people they love, because they inevitably find themselves sacrificing for their loved ones and judging their loved ones as selfish for being more clear or direct about what they want and need.

When you catch yourself judging your loved ones as being selfish, you want to slow down and consider what they are mirroring to you that you need to look at inside yourself. Consider for a moment that as human beings, we have needs and wants built into us. It’s part of being human. So, can it really be selfish to want something, when it’s something you cannot even switch off?

Even the clients I’ve been in conversation with who have never allowed themselves to want or to ask for what they want, have wants and desires. They might hold on to them very tightly, and carry them as secrets that they are not willing to share with others, and yet, they still have them, because they are human. What happens sometimes, is that we have felt disappointed by life so often, or we have been conditioned to believe that wanting for ourselves is selfish, so we suppress our wants and we forget that we have desires of our own.

And, when we slow down to consider the helpfulness of that programming, we can start to unlearn our unhelpful programming, and learn how to allow ourselves to want again. For some it’s a slow process, and that is fine too. The only thing that is required, is a willingness to at least allow yourself to go there.

Amber shares that neither of these first two approaches really helped her get what she wanted, so she has discovered a third alternative that feels far more resonant. The third option is a true partnership with life.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, what it would be like in a romantic relationship if one partner demands and expects that their partner meets all their needs without considering the needs of their partner. The relationship would not be sustainable, because both parties have needs, wants, and desires. And if only one partner’s needs are being met, and the other partner’s needs are ignored, resentment, anger, and disappointment are soon to follow.

It would also not be workable for you to wait for your partner to tell you what to do or what you like or don’t like or what you need or don’t need. Making your partner responsible for figuring out what you want, places a heavy burden on your partner and can breed resentment in you for not feeling like you get to choose for yourself.

Neither of these approaches create a true partnership. True partnership creates an ebb and flow of giving and receiving. It requires that both parties to the relationship make requests of each other, and create agreements about what they would like to see happen in the relationship.

And this is how it is with wanting and dreaming. You are essentially in a partnership with life. Your participation is required. And, you cannot get too attached to getting what you want either, because your partner gets to say either yes or no. In true partnership there is a giving and receiving of ideas, an acknowledgment that both sides are valuable and have something to contribute, a regard for the other side’s point of view, and an acceptance that neither party will always get their request met.

When you choose this approach to wanting and dreaming, it means that you get to yearn and long for what you want. You get to make requests of life, and then get into action to co-create with life what you want to see happen. At the same time, you are mindful of not getting too attached to anything specific, because it’s still a partnership and sometimes your request will be granted. Other times it won’t. This is not good or bad. It simply is the ebb and flow of life. It does not prevent you from asking again or asking for something different. Life simply might have different ideas that are just as valid.

Amber speaks to the truth of it when she says that asking for what you want is vulnerable. Embedded in a request you make, is an act of valuing yourself enough to believe that you are worthy of requesting. The other side of the coin is that just because you ask, doesn’t mean you will get what you ask for. And it can be hard to then not make that mean that you are not worthy of receiving.

You see, you are always worthy of receiving, and yet, a request can be denied in a partnership. True partnership is the freedom to choose what we want to say yes to. Sometimes life will not say yes.

Sometimes I have made requests of life, and I have not received what I asked for. At the time I felt disappointed, even angry. And yet, every time, there was a bigger reason for the no. And me letting go of holding so tightly to what I think I need, helped reveal what I truly need. Most of the time, when I don’t get what I want, something much better comes along.

The other night, I was watching the penultimate episode of the last season of one of my favourite shows, New Amsterdam, and one of the doctors – Dr. Bloom – was looking for a new apartment. She had found the perfect place and had an appointment to go and see the apartment. On her way to go and see the apartment, she encountered one after the other emergency situation. And she ended up spending the whole day saving lives and missing the appointment to view the apartment she had wanted, consequently losing the apartment. At first, she was upset about it. And of course, she would be. That is a normal human response to not getting what we want.

As she was walking home with her friend, they walked past a building with a for sale sign. She asked if she could view the place and the woman let her in. She fell in love with the place and also realised in that moment that what she really needed was an open space that she could work on by herself and create something that is just hers. I thought this was such a beautiful example of partnership with life, where life did not grant her fist request for the apartment she at first thought she wanted, because there was something even better that she needed. And her experience that day, helped her see what she truly needed. She was open and because she was open, life granted her far more than what she thought was possible.

This is a valuable lesson for all of us. I know that when you don’t get what you want, you might feel disappointed, and that is totally fine. You get to have your human experience of disappointment. And my invitation is to not close yourself off when you don’t get what you want, but instead stay open. Stay open to the possibility that perhaps there is something deeper, or more powerful available, and that it will be revealed in time. This has been my experience in jobs lots, friendships that have ended, potential clients who have said no to working with me, rental properties lost etc. Inevitably, a better job comes along, or I realise how toxic the relationship was to my own health and wellbeing, or an even better client comes along who is excited and committed to working with me at a higher fee, or I find a place that suits our needs perfectly and that is in the exact price range we were looking for.

When you surrender to life the parts that you do not control, you invite life to partner with you. You are one hundred percent responsible for YOUR part. You must still show up and take action. And, you can relax into the knowing that you are perhaps not seeing the bigger picture yet, and that if you don’t get what you want, perhaps life has something to offer you that fits you better, or that will serve you in bigger ways.

I used to believe that I was alone, and that I could not trust anyone or anything. About four years ago, my coach invited me to see how much life loves me and has my back. When I started to slow down and notice, I started to become aware that life has always had my back. I am always loved. And so are you, dear reader. Are you willing to let yourself see it?

References:

1. Breytenbach, C. (2021). Using disappointment as a catalyst for inspiration. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/using_disappointment-_as_a_catalyst_for_inspiration/
2. Freyer-Jones, C. & Bauman, M. (2021). What if this Is the Fun Part?: A book about friendship, coaching, dying, living and using everything for your learning, growth and upliftment.