Do you know what you want?

I’m not used to deciding what I want. I’m an easy-going, go with the flow type of person, so if you put something in front of me and ask me if I can do it, the answer is yes. If you ask me if I will do it, I will. If you ask me if I enjoyed it after the fact, I will likely have done it with a smile and so yes, it wasn’t too bad.

But if you ask me beforehand, what do I want to do. I often don’t know what I want to do. I’m working on that. My wife asked me the other day, what do you want to do. On a good day that is met with a question mark. But on a bad day, that can be met with genuine anxiety.

I can handle a lot. I know I can do a lot of hard things. I have had some difficult tasks put in front of me and I take pride in my ability to get it done.

But I have realized that just because I can do something, even well, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what I want to do, or even what I should do.

In the article I wrote about purpose, I shared how this went professionally. I was only going after things I was “supposed to want” or looked “acceptable” for me, or more accurately, “someone like the person I wanted to be.”

Throughout my career, I have done some difficult things. I have made great progress, and I have seen big failure. We can all point to different points in our lives where we were aligned with our purpose, and I’m sure you can think of areas that you were out of alignment. I would bet that it didn’t feel good. No matter what area we are talking about, it just feels right…or wrong.

In school, in our careers, many of us have been doing this our whole lives. Set it up, knock it down. Just keep going. But at which points are we making our own decisions on what to set up, what to knock down?

So, I’m thinking a lot about what I want to do. Not just today, it’s more of an overall shift I’m making. This is all part of it. I’m trying to think about what I want to be doing. What I’m meant to be doing. What is really for me. What really lights me up and makes me feel alive.

I enjoying thinking about that for you too. I hope you are thinking about that for yourself. Are you doing what you really want to do? Are you doing what you’ve chosen? Or are you simply doing what was put in front of you?

It’s ok no matter what you are doing, you are living life and you are where you are. Like I said, I’m far from perfect. I’ve done a lot that wasn’t for me. I’m just realizing what I want and where I can go. But I had to stop and realize how much of this has been in service of stories, goals, ideas that were given to me. Or that I adopted because it kept me safe or gave me a certain status.

We all do it. We all have stories that have kept us out of places. Or kept us in places.

To narrow this back down to health. I know a lot of my former teammates have shared that they find it hard to stay in shape after their playing career ends. There’s no one to tell us where to be or what to do. It’s up to us. And it’s then we realize that we were just following direction all those years. We were performing, doing very well, but that was a path laid out in front of us.

My question today is: Are you doing what you want to be doing? Is your routine, your time, your day-to-day life…is it yours? Or are you just going from one thing to the next. We’ve all done it. We all know how that feels.

It may not be as big as “what is my purpose?” Maybe if we start smaller and think about more day-to-day things. We often have to start small. For example. thinking about your routine: It might be something simple like drinking more water, looking for a new job, or just waking up 15 minutes earlier to meditate, or just writing in your journal today. No matter what it is. Ask yourself if there is anything you want to do that you are not doing. And with the things you are doing, are you doing them because you want to? Are they for you? Is what is it you want to do or if it is something that someone told you to do or something you think you should do.

Life is too short to be doing things we don’t like. Life is way too short to be doing things that make us feel bad, or even harm us in the long run. Let’s think about how we can make the day look more like we want it to look, according to us…according to our goals.