“This is going to sound like a stupid question…”
She hesitates for a moment before continuing.
“...but I genuinely need help with this.
How do I know what I want?”
Most of the other participants have disappeared into breakout rooms. The main Zoom window suddenly feels quiet. This one student has opted to stay in the main Zoom space and talk with me. The topic of my online workshop: Building Confidence.
I want to hug her for daring to ask her question out loud.
Her question doesn’t seem dumb to me – quite the reverse!
I recognise the difficulty, and I tell her so. I’ve been that girl who had no answer for the question “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” I couldn’t see five years ahead. And what was worse, I didn’t know how to think my way towards an answer.
So I say, I’ve been collecting ways to answer your question for about twenty years. If you’ve been feeling like you should already know, you can at least place that burden down.
It’s easy to look around and think:
“I should know what I want. Everybody else seems to. Everyone else finds it easy and obvious – I’m the only one who struggles.”
And if you’re secretly thinking, If I don’t know what I want, that means I can’t get it…
Or even, It doesn’t matter what I want…I’d need to be someone else – a whole other person – to make what I want matter…
I’ve been where you are right now, and I know a way out.
Daring to dream
My path beyond that stuckness began with a book called The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz. If I could give you just one piece from that book, it’s this question:
If you could have it, would you take it?
I remember pausing for a long time when I read it.
The point is: Anything that gets a yes belongs on your Yes Please list.
Whichever area of life or work has been feeling stuck for you, what’s a change that you would love to see happen?
Just to be clear, this question is not about how you might achieve what’s on your Yes Please list. Most people’s brains rush to worry about the how. This is a question about what you’d like to happen, what your best-case scenario looks like. Not the long trials and tribulations along the way — just the last happy-ending scene of the movie.
She nods, jotting something down before looking back at the screen. The other students return from their breakout rooms, and the workshop continues. When the Q&A begins, she speaks up again.
“Thank you for what you said earlier. I think it’s helping. But now I have another question: How do I know if what I seem to want is really my wanting, and not just what I’m supposed to want?”
I’m admiring her perceptive, thoughtful approach to her quest!
I’ve not managed to find a clear dividing line between what you want and what your environment tells you that you should want. The two seem intricately linked. You could say they’re permeable to each other – or that they’re dancing with each other. Sometimes you may be in the lead, dancing the Lead+Follow version; other times you may take your cue from the world and dance in a Follow+Lead style. I’ve come to think that perhaps the two should influence each other. Engaging with input from the world about what’s desirable strikes me as intelligent.
But if you did want some way to distinguish between the two, I would consult your imagination.
For every line on your Yes Please list, imagine your best-case scenario came true. Step into that world. Breathe its air. Take a look around. What does it feel like to be here?
Notice if there’s a rush of joy anywhere in your body, a tiny thrill of triumph. If you can’t detect any excitement, and instead you’re getting a slumped “Well, mum would be pleased,” then you know your answer.
She thanks me again, and the workshop’s finished.
There was so much more I could have said! I find myself wishing I could send her a letter that would add:
Knowing what you want doesn’t tend to descend on you as if from on-high, in one fell swoop. More often it arrives in fragments — a passing thought while walking, a moment of envy when someone describes their work.
Knowing what you want doesn’t tend to descend on you as if from on-high, in one fell swoop. More often it arrives in fragments...
So instead of expecting an epiphany, you might be better off treating it as if you’re building a puzzle. Remember the last puzzle picture that you built? At first you only have a few scattered pieces. You gather them up, spot clusters, search out the corners, and so on. The picture comes together bit by bit.
And so with dreams – you might begin by collecting those inklings of dreams, tiny snippets, wispy whispers.
The greatest challenge at this stage is to stay your hand when you’re about to wave off these undeveloped fragments. Sometimes you can hear it happen in a single sentence: “Ah well… it’s probably unrealistic.”
You’d be surprised how often people dismiss what they want as “just a pipe dream.” Which is curious, considering how much of our world began exactly that way. If you started counting everything in your daily life that began as someone’s pipe dream, I suspect you’d run out of digits very quickly.
Why would anyone dismiss their own dreams?
Before I tell you my take: what would you say?
If you’ve ever done it yourself – or watched someone else doing it – you may have already formed an opinion on this.
Okay, my turn.
The best I’ve been able to figure it:
Wanting what you want… can feel downright scary.
There’s no getting away from it.
It's real.
It gets to your guts.
The more real the dream, the more intense the fright.
There, I’ve said it.
Now let’s step in to take a closer look.
One big reason a dream can feel frightening is the distance between where you are and where it seems to live. Sometimes the distance feels so large that the dream begins to look faintly ridiculous.
What if you knew the shape of the journey ahead of time?
Because every project — every dream — tends to follow a certain shape.
The first home your fantasy needs is inside you
One model I like names four stages of a dream coming true, like this:
- fantasise it
- dream it
- plan it
- do it.
This model has stayed with me because it helped me notice that nebulous first stage. Like so many, I was too quick to dismiss my own dreams – because there wasn’t anything obvious to hold on to.
What’s the difference between a fantasy and a dream?
In this model, fantasy describes the stage of hazy musings, daydreams too blurry to even put into words – certainly too vague to articulate to someone else. There’s barely anything to it, just misty wisps of fugitive ideas.
Fantasy is the stage where many despair and give up. Not because their dream is impossible. But because they don’t recognise what this stage needs, what it asks of them.
If you ask too much of your dream too soon, it cannot yet meet those demands. The mists disperse, instead of coalescing.
If you ask too much of your dream too soon, it cannot yet meet those demands. The mists disperse, instead of coalescing.
I wish I had a story to illustrate this dynamic. But… this is the stage before anything tangible has shown up. Too often, these are the stories that don’t get to be told – because they didn’t get to live.
Even so, I know these first burgeonings are real. Time and again, folks who say they “have no dream” start telling me about some secret wish. Sometimes, all it takes is a bit of tender and attentive listening.
Like my neighbour who suddenly admitted “I have a secret fantasy of living on a house boat.” As he says this, he blinks and looks away, as if his own words surprised him. I ask him to tell me more, and he says, “Oh, it’s nothing.”
But it clearly isn’t nothing. His face lit up like a beacon as he spoke. I make a secret wish of my own at such moments: that something would help the person hold their dream, as tenderly as I would.
Because the fantasy stage asks you to nurture your dream-to-be. It asks you to defend its fragile early whispers against the onslaught of unsympathetic questions, both others’ and your own. It asks you to protect the forming seed inside you from harsh winds.
How do you know when the seed of fantasy is starting to become the sapling of a dream?
This second stage is where your dream begins to take shape. It’s grown past the stage of wordless yearning. It starts to develop definition. Specific details come into view. This is the stage when it becomes possible to describe your dream to another person. If someone were to ask a question about your dream, you either know the answer, or it’s possible to imagine it.
In The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz compares this process to designing your dream home. You might begin from a fuzzy notion that you’d like a lovely home. This is not yet the time to launch into building one: you need to get to know what your dream home looks like. This is the time to collect and select ideas: how many bedrooms would your dream home have? What kind of views could you glimpse from out of the windows? Town or country? Hilltop or valley? Peaceful seclusion or the buzz of community?
All these details were implied in your original fantasy, as the sapling is implied in the seed. But to take it out into the world, you need to coax faint outlines to become firm and clear.
All these details were implied in your original fantasy, as the sapling is implied in the seed.
At this stage, you may still worry that your dream is not feasible – but it’s already become more substantial and robust than the original dim sketch.
Your goal at this second stage is to get to know the most enticing version of your dream so well that you could almost touch it. It needs to become like a garden that you’ve visited so often that you could take someone on a guided tour with your eyes closed.
Once you can do that — and only then — the time has come to think of ways to bring the dream about.
Too many of us try to adjust our dream so it fits inside the reality we already know. We try to make our dream play the follower, and let existing reality take the lead. Then we wonder why following familiar reality has led us back to square one.
If you nurture your fantasy until it grows into a dream, something remarkable tends to happen. A new ally shows up to help you lead reality to come along, and let your dream start to exist in a material, tangible form.
Inspired Intelligence
I’ve seen it so many times: once people have glimpsed their dream in its full, blazing, enchanting glory, something changes inside them.
Before, your eyes were tethered to the ground, so you noticed every pebble and obstacle in the way. You couldn’t take reality by the hand and lead it towards your dream.
Now, with your eyes full to the brim with the dream’s golden haze, you can take the lead. Your gaze is lifted, your limbs primed for the stroll.
Before, the pebbles had seemed boulders, insurmountable. Now you can take in the scene with a different sense of scale. You begin to seem taller than the hurdles.
When a postman in a rural area cherished his vision of a “fairy palace,” he began to bring home bits of rock from his daily rounds. With no architectural training, he built his fantasy creation by hand over 33 years. Ferdinand Cheval’s masterpiece is now known as the Palais Idéal. It measures about 12 meters high and 26 meters long. It’s famous throughout France. His palace began the same way many dreams begin — with a private image no one else could yet see.
When the dream is in the lead, even pebbles can get pressed into service. I call this effect Inspired Intelligence. Opportunities begin to appear where, before, you felt hemmed in by obstacles.
I call this effect Inspired Intelligence. Opportunities begin to appear where, before, you felt hemmed in by obstacles.
It’s surprisingly hard to believe in this effect until you experience it for yourself.
I’ve seen how Inspired Intelligence is often mightier than naked willpower. It carries a spark of ingenuity.
Want to check this for yourself? Think back to a time when you were attempting something you’d never mastered before. There were so many obstacles, so many dead ends. How did you manage to make headway?
My favourite image for such moments is an empty toolbelt — a metaphor that came to me years ago when I taught myself some DIY because I was making over my son’s bedroom.
Ever since then, whenever I decide what I’m going for, I imagine putting on a new toolbelt for the adventure. Its slots may start out empty, but they won’t remain that way for long. Every time I’ve played this little game with myself, I’ve been astonished by how quickly the slots in that metaphorical toolbelt began to fill. Within a fortnight, I had lots more ways and tools than I could have guessed at the start!
These days, I would call that effect Inspired Intelligence in action.
I know it’s waking up in someone when they say things like “I’ve just realised there was a way forward all along — I’d simply never noticed it before.”
It can also sound like this:
“After twenty minutes of us talking, I suddenly feel like my dream is possible.”
That moment — when someone suddenly feels their dream might be possible — is one of my favourite things to witness.
It’s not that their dream has suddenly become easier. It’s that something inside them has changed position. Instead of dismissing the small seed of a wish, they begin to treat it as something worth tending. And once the dream becomes vivid enough, a different kind of intelligence comes online.
Instead of dismissing the small seed of a wish, they begin to treat it as something worth tending.
Most of us have been trained to do the opposite. To let reality take the lead, and ask our dreams to follow. But sometimes the more fruitful experiment is to reverse the roles. You won’t force reality to follow the dream, perhaps. But with the spark of your Inspired Intelligence, new actions may become visible, which will gradually reshape reality, in conversation with the dream.
Letting your dream lead
If you allowed the dream to lead for a while,
instead of the shoulds and the have-to’s —
what would you do?
how would that feel?
If you noticed even the faintest
inkling of a wish stirring in you —
what would it be like to welcome it?
You never know which tiny seed
might turn out to contain
a whole garden.
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