Know Your WANT (Not Your Why): Change My Life

Get clear on your Why. 

Help me change my life? You really need to know your Why to get what you want. 

I’m sure you’ve heard this trending spiritual advice. Everyone’s talking about the Why as if it’s the magic mojo.

Understanding that the reason—your Why—you want to own a red Lamborghini is to feel affluent and you like to go fast might motivate you more. (Whyers love to say that once you understand this Why motivation you can get happy with the Toyota Corolla, because then you really understand it’s not the Lamborghini you desire.) You want to get that dream job—and your Why is so that you can prove your dad didn’t know what he was talking about when he told you to major in accounting—this insight might help you stick it to your dad in ways that don’t require you to get a 9-5 job. Why Theory has become so important that I’ve lately heard people say they have abandoned what they wanted because they couldn’t figure out what their Why is.

Really?

In our culture we often say, “they did it for no good reason.”

As if reason, let alone good reason, is required to make any damn choice at all.

Lean in and listen to my sage wisdom:

You don’t need a Why.

You don’t need a rational, legit reason to want something. There needs to be no foreseeable payoff to any action taken or not taken …

except …

I want it.

or

I don’t want it.

Lately I’ve been finding huge liberation in this as a spiritual practice. Once you start making choices from the Want place instead of the Why place it becomes intoxicating.

Leave open the possibility that you don’t even know how something will make you feel. You maybe don’t understand what the end-gift will be, all you know is that your Wanting of it will lead you to whatever it is your Soul seeks.

Want to go to Hawaii in January? Go.

Want to start taking voice lessons? Do it.

Don’t want to take this project? Don’t.

You don’t need to explain it to anyone else. You don’t need to explain it to yourself. No justification required. No good reason. No Shouldas.

When you focus on saying YES! to your Soul, as in the Year of YES!, you stop this incessant and absurd demand for the Why and choose instead to focus on the Want.

Your Soul says “I want to go to Peru in the spring,” and you go. You don’t demand to know what your Soul intends to get out of it, you just go. Your Soul says, “I don’t want to hang out with them anymore,” and you don’t. You stop arguing, justifying, debating and weighing pros and cons. Rather, you live from a place where the Why isn’t important.

It’s following Want that is life transforming.

Because I want to.

Because I don’t want to.

There really is no reason required for any choice aside from these two feelings.

What do you want?