Figuring out what I want

Disclaimer – this post may make no sense at all. I’m trying to write while the renovators put in a drywall ceiling and drill into the floor beneath my feet. I am leaving the house ASAP. This is ridiculous.

Focus – I suck at it.

I was reading a blog post yesterday that really got me thinking. It was by Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing, who we all know is awesome and smart, and when he opens his mouth, will usually say something pretty intelligent. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him make a completely dumbass remark. So you can see why he’s so lovable.

Anyways, now that I’m done gushing, on to something intelligible.

He was talking about starting with the end in mind – when you’re working on a project or your business, you take actions specifically with the end result you’d like to create. Which ya know, makes perfect sense and seems logical and something a very smart person would do.

That is of course, unless you’re me, and not a smart person, and spend your entire life faffing around and not getting anything done and just kind of fluttering from activity to activity with no real intention. Any success I’ve ever had has been a by-product of sheer stupidity, shit luck and good timing on my part.

In my defense, my faffing is genetic – I blame my mother. If you look up “faffing” in the dictionary, there will be a picture of my mother, in a great rush because she has to be somewhere on time, contemplating whether she should buy sugar or not buy sugar and do we even need sugar and what kind of sugar should we get and will anybody be baking this week?

I’ve been raised to faff. It’s not my fault.

However, I’m responsible for changing it

It’s my life, and despite the fact that I came by my faffing honestly, I do still need to do something about it. So I sat down this morning and I was all prepared to be brilliant and come up with some focus and what I wanted my end results to be.

And that’s when it hit me – I had no idea what I wanted. Not a clue. I don’t know where I want my business to go, or what I want the result of a post to be, or why I’m on Twitter all the time, or how much I’m trying to sell, or how much money I need to make or anything. Everythiing I do is completely at random. There’s no rhyme or reason. My only plan is “What project is screaming loudest? Let’s do that!”

Now, if you looked up “ineffective” in the dictionary, you’d find my picture next to it.

But I still don’t know what I want! *whine*

Really, I don’t. I don’t know what I want, I don’t know where I want to go, I don’t know what kind of results to produce, or how much money I need to make or anything at all. I have this huge block around setting goals or intentions or anything at all.

I can’t get a vision in my head at all of what I’m working towards. I’m just hoping something will come up. It’s not that I think I have to have my entire life planned out, but I should at least have some sort of vision for the life I want to create right?

But I don’t. I just can’t seem to connect the two. The thought completely terrifies me to be honest. I can’t state what I want. I feel like I’m not allowed to. It’s a personal power thing – stating what you want is a declaration of autonomy, of independence. This is you, this is what you want, and by golly, you’re going to get it!

I start to do that and then dissolve into a massive puddle of jelly. That’s right – a puddle of jelly. That’s a lot of jiggling.

So it’s something I’m definitely going to think about over the next few days. For now though, it seems that I cannot think anymore because my brain is buzzing from that bloody power drill.

Good god, I need to get out of here. That is, of course, unless this gigantic thunderstorm comes through. In which case, I think I’m stuck here. I ain’t walking anywhere in that. Ironically, it doesn’t look like anything productive is happening today.

Tags: figuring out what you want, focus, productivity