Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 169, "What Don't You Want?" Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:19 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome back. So glad to have you. I just love doing these podcasts. Can I tell you they're so much fun for me? I love preparing them and I love the insights that I gain as I really work to put my thoughts and my ideas together. And I love that I get to share it with you. I just pray that they're helping you to step more into the kind of person that you want to be, helping you to understand concepts that will improve the quality of your relationships, the quality of your dreams and your desires, and what you want to accomplish. It's just what this is about right? I love it so much. So thanks for being here. If you're brand new, welcome to the podcast. I hope you find some great stuff here. Go back and look at past titles and see what may interest you and take a look. See what happens for you. There's good stuff going on here. 

01:13 

Alright. Here we go. Today's podcast is entitled "What Don't You Want?" So I thought this was interesting. I heard this question proposed on something I was listening to a few weeks ago, and I've been really thinking about it because most often we're asked what we want. And I know that I've asked that question a lot, because as we step into middle age a lot of times we as women are like "well, I don't know what I want," because we spent so many years in service of other people, putting our own needs last, thinking about our children or our spouse or our church calling, our friends, our home responsibilities, work responsibilities...all of that seems to have come first for so many of us. And we've really lost touch with ourselves and so many women I work with feel a little bit lost when we start talking about what they really want in life. They just don't know. In fact, so many are so out of touch with themselves that they don't really know what their favorite food is or their favorite color or what they enjoy doing for fun, because everything that they've done has been others-oriented for so long. 

02:20 

I know that I figured out once that I went, I think it was 19 years, without really having a Saturday to myself overall. Now, obviously I did have some. There were pieces here and there. But between year-round competitive sports for my kids and choir concerts and plays that they were in and church responsibilities and my spouse at the time was really heavy into scouting and coaching. I spent 19 years at the beck and call of somebody else. And I did take time to go on trips with my sisters once a year or once every other year or out to lunch and a movie night with friends occasionally, but not on the regular. And I completely lost track of what I love to do. I love to read and you know what? I probably went seven, eight, 10 years, I don't know, without really reading a book. Isn't that just crazy? I let myself get so busy. And I love to play volleyball. And at one point I found a group of people to play volleyball with at nine o 'clock at night on a Wednesday. Now for some of you, you're like, "oh my night's just getting started." I will tell you for me, I am zoning out and I'm usually in bed asleep by about 10. But I started to do this and it was so much fun because I love to play volleyball and this was good, competitive volleyball. It was fun to reconnect with something that I loved. 

03:48 

But I'll tell you, eventually it got to be too much and I stopped going because I was getting up to exercise at five a .m. I had four kids who needed constant kid stuff. There were meals and carpools and sports games and messy rooms and I was so happy to see my children thriving and growing and progressing and to see my home doing well. But I put myself on the back burner and I forgot about things that I loved, about things that I enjoyed. I forgot about myself and I didn't find other ways to do things, like volleyball that I loved, or reading books that I loved. And sometimes I think that we feel that that's what we're supposed to do. We feel that we're supposed to "forget ourselves and go to work," that we should always be in service of others, that we are only truly Christlike when we waste and wear out our lives in taking care of other people. I know that some of those phrases sound familiar to you. They're ones that I have latched onto over the years that have had me putting myself on the back burner. And yet we often conveniently forget that Christ took time off to go off and work by himself to refresh, to commune with his Father, to reconnect with his divine purpose. We are actually taught by Christ himself to love others as we love ourselves. Such a valuable, valuable concept to remember, that we are to love ourselves, to take care of  ourselves, to nurture ourselves. When we become our best selves, when we tap into our God-given possibility, our ability to love and to serve and to give multiplies. And only then, when we become our best selves, growing our innate talents and abilities and increasing in the wisdom available to us, only then can we be the instruments in God's hands that we seek to be. 

05:47 

So I feel it's imperative that we take the time to really know what we want, to tap into our deepest desires, our dreams for ourselves, and for our future and our relationships. I believe that those dreams come from our spirit saying, "hey, this is what we're called to do. This is where we need to go." And I feel that when we start stepping into this space, that we begin to find our greatest contentment, our greatest peace, our greatest knowing. 

06:18 

But here's the question then after so many years of neglecting ourselves, how do we start to do this? How do we start to step into the space of knowing ourselves again, of tapping into our desires? And that brings me to the title of this podcast and one great strategy that I discovered a couple of weeks ago and that I've been using on myself and I've asked a couple of people because I thought it was intriguing is to ask yourself, "well, what don't I want?" If you're struggling really knowing what you do want, let's start here. Sometimes this is an easier gateway to understanding ourselves. When we've lost touch with our wants, tapping into what we don't want can sometimes be an easier place to start. So what comes up for you? What don't you want in your life? Let me give you a couple of mine just to give you a good example of how this works and how I process this over the last few weeks. 

07:17 

For me, I don't ever want another dysfunctional marriage. I don't want constant miscommunication. I don't want selfishness and complaining and defending. OK, now I understand I'm human. If I get married, the person I marry is going to be human. So obviously these things will surface. That's what humans do, right? And if I do marry somebody, both of us are going to have some pretty strong patterns of behavior already built into our brains that when certain situations come up, our brain is going to go, "oh girl, I got you. I know how to handle this. Don't even worry about it." And our brain is going to fall back on these patterns of behavior that I used for so many years in my marriage. So it's going to take a lot of processing, but I don't want those patterns of behavior to become my go-to behavior. I don't want them to be the norm. So when they come up, I want them to actually be the abnormal behavior, the behavior that makes me stand back and say, "whoa, whoa, that didn't feel good at all. That's not what I like. That's not what I want to create. That's not how I want to be." And I want it to startle me, to shake me up a bit, so that I'm willing to acknowledge my poor behavior, to circle around and try it again. 

08:39 

So when I talked about my 90-Day relationship, that was a really, really brilliant opportunity for me to practice showing up the way that I want to show up as the new me in the first real relationship where I've been able to implement a lot of this stuff. I found it was a brilliant opportunity where I did show up as me, where I could practice the process of doing so many of these things that I talk about. And it really worked and I was amazed. And it's not that those old patterns didn't start to surface at times, but I found that because I've put such so much effort into creating these new thought patterns in my head and implementing them in other relationships in my life with my children, with my friends, with other people, that it was much easier for me to become what I want to. 

09:33 

That's one example of what I don't want, and by taking the time to explore it, I begin as well to understand what I do want. So in this example, what I don't want helps me to understand that I do want a relationship of grace, of understanding, or acceptance. And once I know that, then I can begin to understand what kind of person I need to become in order to create that and in order to attract that in the people that I choose to date. Right? So I have found that as I have been dating more, I've moved into these conversations quite early in the process of dating someone, and finding out "are you willing to go to this space with me, to really put in a concerted effort to create what we want to create?"And I've been amazed that I've found people. And it's been a really, really fun thing for me. 

10:32 

So, okay, so let me give you another example, though, of what I don't want. I don't want to be estranged from my children. I don't want them to feel as though my love is conditional on the choices they make or how they show up or whether they decide to go to church or get tattoos or live with a boyfriend or girlfriend. I don't want them to ever feel judged by me, to feel  that they can't trust me or confide in me. Such an amazing starting point to discover what I do want and figuring out the kind of person I need to be to create this type of relationship atmosphere with my children. This is the best starting point, right? Understanding what I don't want. If I don't want them to feel judged, I need to learn to be more accepting, to learn to love in a really clean way, without manipulation and expectations. If I want them to trust me, I need to learn to be trustworthy in every way, which for me means that I am honest with my children, that I have appropriate boundaries so they know that when I say "yes," I'm saying it wholeheartedly and that when I say "no," I'm saying it wholeheartedly as well. 

11:42 

If I don't want to be estranged, then that shows me as well how I can show up. For example, I have one child who is not currently interested in having much of a relationship with me. And this is painful. And because it's painful, it can be easy to write him off in my brain, to seek to protect myself from his perceived rejection, to make it easier to stay away than continue to reach out with love and a sincere desire to connect. It's an easy thing for me to want to text snide, little comments about how it would be nice to see him, or how he should text me back, right? But knowing that I don't want to be estranged from him, or any of my children, teaches me about how I do want to show up with him. I want him to know that I love him regardless of how he shows up. I want him to know that my door is always open when he chooses to walk through it. And I want him to know that I have created a safe space for him when he is ready to come into it. I want him to know that when he is ready, I am ready. 

12:53 

And knowing that this is what I want, then, teaches me what I need to learn and implement in order to create that environment. I need to learn, then, how to be okay with the pain of him not wanting to connect, and I get to show up anyway. I need to learn not to turn away from that pain, but rather lean into it. I want to feel the pain of my relationship with him because when I choose not to feel the pain, I'm turning away from him and from our relationship. So for me, in this situation, learning to be okay with the pain, that's the space of acceptance of him. Because right now, what he can offer me, what he wants to offer me, is exactly what he is offering. And to me, what he's offering feels like distance, but accepting that for whatever reason he is offering me all he can right now, believing that he's offering me everything he's capable of right now, this creates compassion in my heart for him. It keeps me engaged when it would be so easy to turn away. 

13:58 

So knowing what I don't want really helps me to clarify for me what I do want. And when I connect with that with what I do want, then I can begin to understand my path, my progression, what I need to learn and understand in order to grow into the person who can create what I want. Because getting what I want in life is going to require that I become a different person. It requires that I do things differently than I have been doing them, because if I was doing those things, I would already be that different person, right? So when I look at the person that I want to be in the future, the reason I'm not that person is because I don't have all the traits and abilities and strengths and wisdom that she has. So what do I have to do to become that person? 

14:55 

So let's look back to this question. Let's turn this back to you. What don't you want? And I want you to really ask yourself some tough questions here. I want you to work through this concept on paper. Write it down. Okay, that's what I did because that slows you down and it helps you connect with thoughts and feelings that otherwise are really hard to acknowledge when we're just thinking. So I feel like I was pretty clear on these two situations I shared with you today. But just this process of writing down my thoughts about them clarified some things for me about what I wanted to do differently in my head. I felt I was clear but when I started writing them all out. I was like, "oh, the little pieces fit into place much better about the kind of person that I want to be and about how I want to show up, of things that I want to work on so I can love more cleanly and unconditionally." 

15:48 

And this is the deal, my friends. Middle-age is the perfect time to start to connect again with who you are and with what you want. Because for the first time in many years, some of us have time to ourselves. We have space to think and we have room to grow and we have choices of what we want to do with this extra space and time. Sometimes we have more money than we used to have. Well, our lives are changing and so this is a perfect time to start really exploring what we don't want and that helps us to discover what we really do want. So what do you want? All of us want something different and that's the beauty of life. Me? A few things I want? I want thrivingw healthy relationships. I Want to serve the world through my coaching business and help people to connect with themselves and others and create the lives that they want. I want open,  happy, loving relationships with my children, where we trust each other. 

16:56 

What about you? Please do not be scared to ask yourself the tough questions. And let me tell you this, if you are scared, let me help you. This is what I do as a life coach. I ask the tough questions in a compassionate, loving, safe space where you can explore it and know you're not going to be judged, know that you're not going to burst into a ball of flames or fall through the cracks or go crawling your bed for a week and not come out. I help you walk through this process, if this is struggling. I help you clarify what you want and I help you figure out how to get it. Tapping into our God-given possibility is probably the most thrilling and amazing experience of our lives, because that taps into our spirit. It lets our spirit speak. It lets our spirit come alive. Our spirit knows what it was created to do. It knows what is going to be most fulfilling and amazing. And that's where our dreams and our desires and what we want come from. 

18:03 

Okay, so are you ready? Game on my friends, let's go. I've got you. Keep coming back here. Keep working on these things. Call me if you need to and get in touch with me, well, you don't call me. But you can go to tanyahale.com. You can book a free 30 minute coaching session to get you started. And I would love to help you move more into this space. My dream is to help you move into your dreams. And, I feel that really deeply and I want to help you. I want to help you. So if you are ready to step into some tough work, some amazing work and find the "you" that you've been, you've been searching for and missing for all these years, let's connect and let's do this. Okay. Alright. If you feel this podcast is adding value, please share it. Please, please, please share it with people. You know, it helps the people that you share it with as well as it helps other people find it because the more that people listen to it and if you leave me a review, the more it goes up in the charts of being recommended for other people. So that's one way that you can really serve in the world, is to share amazing information with other people. And if you feel that this is amazing information, please share it. Okay? My friends, that's going to do it for me today. I wish you all the best and I will see you next week. Ciao. 

19:37 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.