Kate's Nuggets

Creating a Vision When You Don't Know What You Want
Episode 3

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I am talking about what happens when we don't know what we want and we want to have a vision for what we want to create in our lives. And we can't. And why this can be so distressing and so palpable.

I've got several clients who... One actively struggling now, some over the course of the time have come and they're like, "I know I'm not happy with my life and I know something needs to change. But I don't know what. And I can't decide what I want to do next." And they really struggle with articulating a vision.

I want to talk a little bit about first, why it's so important to have a vision. And secondly, what you need in order to have a vision. And what you can do if you are struggling to that.

So the problem if you don't have a vision for what you want, is that you can't take steps towards making it happen.

And so then it reinforces the sense of futility and helplessness and disappointment. And it is really hard.

So the thing about change is that when you have your vision and you're disappointed, they sort of work together to fuel each other. And then you take some first steps and that mix of vision and disappointment, plus those first steps have to be greater than your fear of change and your discomfort with change in order for change to actually happen.

Think about vision and dissatisfaction being sort of multipliers. If you only have the dissatisfaction and you don't have the vision, then that's zero impact of that cluster. And then your first step needs to be overcoming the resistance and fear of change all by itself.

So what can we do about this if you don't have a vision?

The first thing is to understand what a vision requires.

A vision requires two things. The first is a sense of the feeling that you want to have in your life.

For most people, the sense of feeling that they want to have in their life is a sense of aliveness. A sense of engagement.

You might think of the word flow. A sense of open-heartedness. A sense of connection with other people.

But there may just be a specific area in your life where you're not feeling what you want to feel. So you need to know what that feeling is in order to be able to develop a vision.

The next thing that you need is you actually need some images in your mind from your past experience, whether it's from the media or the magazines. Or from things that you've done in the past that your brain connects from the feeling that you want to that image.

The vision becomes that thing that your brain imagines will bring you the feeling that you want.

That is what a vision is.

It's an image that your brain says, "When that happens, I'm going to feel the way that I want to in my life."

There are three things that can go wrong that make it hard to figure out what your vision is.

The first is sort of the easiest one to deal with emotionally. And that is not actually having the tangible vision of what you want. You might not know what job, or what kind of place to live, or what vacation, or what relationship, or how much money, or what weight you want to be. Or even sort of what style and charm and glamour you sort of carry with you in the world will give you the feeling that you want.

And if you don't have those images, what you need to do is you need to go and get some images. So you can watch movies or watch TV. Or go glance through magazines or webpages. Or go to museums or go out to events and just experience a bunch of things.

And try and notice, "Okay, there's the feeling that I want. What connects with that feeling for me?"

Then you start having a vision.

That can be challenging because you don't know in advance whether it's what is going to work. But it's just a question of going out and doing research.

What makes me feel the way I want to feel?

The thing that's really hard is when you can't actually connect to that feeling that you want in your life. And this is a problem for sensitive people, people who have suffered rejection, people who have a sense that life has been hard to them and they don't have a sense of possibility and agency in their lives.

There are a lot of reasons that you can lose touch with what it is that you want to feel.

The first is you might actually have numbed yourself to the sensation in your body, generally.

If you are not comfortable with feeling feelings generally. And you've numbed yourself and you intellectualize, then you won't actually connect to what feelings you want to have in your life.

The solution to this is to start paying attention to your body.

What are the sensations in your body that you're feeling at any given time?

And to start matching those sensations with emotions.

And that's a training process. It's just about wakening up your self-awareness.

The reason that people shut down their self-awareness is because it helps them avoid uncomfortable emotions.

And avoiding uncomfortable emotions is a human thing. We all do it.

Sometimes it serves us, and sometimes it doesn't. And if it gets in our way by stopping us being able to have a vision, it's worth building some tolerance for being uncomfortable and feeling uncomfortable feelings.

There's a specific thing that comes up in the realm of not visioning. That is a particular emotional state that people want to avoid. And that is, if we don't know how to get what we want, if we've been stymied in our attempts to get what we want in the past. If we fear rejection or we feel like we are not in control of our lives, it may feel overwhelming to experience the disappointment and the frustration that live in the gap between how we actually feel about our lives, and how we want to feel about our lives.

That gap can feel unbelievably overwhelming if we don't have hope about how to bridge that gap. So building some capacity to be specifically with the disappointment in that gap is an important and crucial part of building your ability to imagine what you want for your future so that you can create that.

Lots of people need a companion on the journey.

For some people that companion's a therapist. For some people that companion's a coach. For some it's a friend. It might be a family member. For some it's a journal.

For some it might be an animal, like you might have a pet. That's like if you've got a dog that will sit on your lap. And if you sort of will stroke the dog and soothe yourself stroking the dog. And talk to the dog about your disappointment, sometimes they can hold that for you.

Children use stuffed animals like this. There's no shame in being a grownup and using a stuffed animal the same way.

If you don't have a good way of really building that emotional comfort with the discomfort, what you can do is you can start taking little steps toward any inkling of a feeling that you have. Any sense of change that you want to make, take some steps toward the change. Whether it's towards a feeling or whether it's towards a goal that somebody else thinks you might have.

If you start taking steps, you start realizing that you have agency in your life.

You start building hope.

And that starts to create the possibility of being willing to change because it decreases the sense of futility.

So, there are some things about how to deal if you're struggling to figure out what it is you want in your life.

End Theme and Credits:
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To dig deeper into the topics I cover on the podcast, follow me at instagram.com/SignalFireKate or at facebook.com/katearmscoach.
To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.