Chapter 4: Taking Charge of Your Life 61
Knowing what you want
Alice (in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) asks the Cheshire
Cat, ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?’, with-
out having any clear idea of where she wants to go, she just wants to go
somewhere. The Cheshire Cat responds that Alice is sure to get somewhere if
she just walks long enough. Like Alice, imagine what would happen next time
you go to a train station and ask for ‘a ticket to somewhere’.When you’re trying to move forward and achieve your goals, life is so much
easier if you become very clear about what you really want. So often in life,
you get caught up in what you don’t want and spend an awful lot of energy,
both physical and emotional, in avoiding the undesirable result.To figure out what you want and put your energies towards achieving it,
sit down and write your own obituary. You can then decide on the legacy
you want to leave to posterity and the actions you need to take to fulfil that
legacy. For more information on this technique, head to Chapter 3, where you
can discover that your unconscious mind is a wonderful ally in assisting you
to achieve the goals you want.A client, Denise, was trying to ‘escape’ from her second marriage. One of her
first statements was, ‘I’m bad with relationships.’ On working through her
issues, we discovered that she had lost her much loved grandfather as a very
young child. The trauma of this particular event had gone very deep into
Denise’s psyche, and her fear of loss had been driving her to end her relation-
ships before she had to experience the pain of loss again. Because Denise was
focusing, at a subconscious level, on what she didn’t want – the pain of loss –
her unconscious mind was assisting her in maintaining behaviours that made
her avoid the pain. Unfortunately, this approach created other problems.
For her to get the relationship she craved, she had to think about and design
exactly what she wanted in a relationship, and then focus on creating that in
her life.
One way to discover what you really want is to go way into your future.
Imagine that you’re a grey-haired grandparent. You’re sitting on a rock, under
the stars, with a roaring campfire in front of you, and your grandchildren are
at your feet demanding another story about your life. Would you want to tell
them of the time you missed the chance to fulfil a dream because you were
too scared or too influenced by someone else’s ‘you can’t’? Or would you want
to tell them that, despite all the odds and in keeping with your values, you did
something spectacular?