Please please please, let me get what I want

What if everything you ‘want’ is already within reach, if you chose it?

We often play car games as a family🚙‘What’s your top 5…?’ comes up regularly…

⚽️Top 5 footballers

🍪Top 5 biscuits and cakes

🎵Top 5 song lyrics

…I know what you’re thinking, 5 hours in a car with me to Scotland sounds FUN! 💃🏻

Of my top 5 lyrics: ‘so, please please please, let me get what I want.’ is up there…teenage melancholia and life insight in one line. (And melancholia is in my top 5 favourite words, alongside ‘choose’ and the great Scottish ‘dour’, ‘dreich’, and of course…’bahookie’.)

What do you want?

And the coaching question…

What if you changed the word want to choose?

Choose. A delightfully empowering word that immediately moves you into creative thinking to get closer to what you desire.

Early in my retail jobs the impact of ‘choose vs want’ was delivered with radical candor and a hefty dose of constructive criticism…

A store visit with my boss: we walked into the backroom of my store and faced a warehouse full of flies. Not great. Not what I wanted the impression of my standards to be.

I explained that I ‘wanted’ rid of the flies and listed all the reasons they’d taken over: bins, warm weather, broken chiller…

‘Carol, I hear you saying you don’t want flies, but if you have flies, you are choosing to have flies.’ Oof!

Whilst I wanted to wallow in the criticism and my excuses, they had unintentionally highlighted a coaching question that has become one of my top 5: what do you want vs. what do you choose?

I had wanted rid of the flies, but that didn’t mean I’d made a choice that would sort them out.

We can spend a lot of time thinking about and hoping for what we want.

It’s passive.

We might wholeheartedly want something to be…be better, be happy, be enough, be more content…

But when we choose?

Personally I think that's the changer.

It shifts the thought, feels different, and puts wants into action.

An exceptional coach once said to me: You can’t think your way out of a problem you felt your way into.

And I’d add: you also can’t want your way into something you’re not choosing to act on.

‘Please, please, please let me get what I choose’ doesn’t quite hit the same pangs of teenage angst…

But it does sound far more hopeful.

So perhaps- what’s one thing you keep saying you ‘want’… but haven’t yet chosen?

And the 5 hours in a car is always worth it for a Scottish bakery choice!