Create Your Impact: Start With What You Don't Want

Someone asks what you want, and your mind goes quiet.

Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The other kind. You can list what your team needs, what your family needs, what the next six months need from you. Then the question turns toward you, and there's nothing there.

And truth be told, the question kind of annoys you.

It's hard work. It means you have to go inside, down to the place where you could see what you want and put it into words. That room hasn't been opened in a while.

Let's stop and look at that for a minute.

Why would it irritate you? Why would wanting be work?

Maybe because somewhere along the line, people stopped listening when you said what you wanted. You'd say it, and it would get talked over, or postponed, or set aside for something more urgent. After enough of that, you learned. It became easier to put yours down and pick up theirs.

The want didn't die. It just stopped speaking up. It stopped feeling like it counted.

The door that's still open

So I'm not going to ask you what you want. Not yet.

There's another question, and I'd bet you can answer it without going inside at all.

What don't you want?

The no doesn't get buried the way the want does. Nobody talked it out of you. It's been sitting close to the surface this whole time, clear and a little fierce.

It's yours and you know it well. That question is where we start.

The woman I refused to become

I know the buried want. I lived years unable to tell you what I was hoping for, because putting it out there felt self-centered. Selfish. All about me.

What finally moved me wasn't a vision. It was a face.

An aunt I loved dearly. A woman with so much love and personality to give, who sat back, shrank, grew afraid, and lost her confidence a little more each year. She died scared and lonely, with all her gifts still inside her.

She was someone who drew me to her as a child. She talked fast, had ideas and stories, teased and played and lit up every conversation she joined.

Watching that light dim is one of my saddest memories.

I couldn't have told you what I wanted back then. But ask me what I didn't want, and my whole body knew. I was not going to disappear the way she had. I was not going to die with my gifts still inside me.

That refusal carried me when nothing else could.

Where the bridge begins

There's a distance between who you are right now and who you're meant to become. I call it the chasm. You cross it on a bridge, built one plank at a time, one small step after one small step.

The first plank is what gets you onto the bridge. And it's this: what you don't want.

Not your goals. Not a five-year plan. The place you refuse to end up.

Now, Fred. At Tiny Brave Steps we pull fear out of our heads and give it a body: a little dragon who's lost most of his fire, more worried companion than monster. He has access to everything that has ever happened to you. He knows what hurt, what shamed you, what left you crying under your blankets for days.

The moment you decide to keep growing, you'll hear him. The reasonable argument that you're fine as you are. Staying put is easier, less work, more comfortable.

Your job is to notice when Fred has put on his glasses and is reading your past files.

Here's where you step up and ask: Who do I want to be?

And while you're in those files, pull out one more list. It may be short. Who don't you want to be?

The push that carries you

The want pulls you. The don't-want pushes you.

On good days the pull is enough. But you know the other days. The tired ones, when the horizon feels like fiction and staying put sounds reasonable. On those days, what keeps your feet moving is the push.

The place you will not go back to. The woman you will not become. Naming it isn't negative thinking. It's fuel.

And after years of laying this plank down with women who couldn't yet say what they wanted, I can tell you what surprises them most. The refusal points to its opposite. Stand inside what you don't want, turn around, and you're facing the want from a different angle.

Your first plank

Think about it.

Who's someone you love but don't want to be like? Where have you seen someone you respect end up in a place you never want to go? Looking back from your deathbed, what would be the worst thing to see?

Finish this sentence, on paper: "I'm not willing to end up..." One line. Or ten. Honest, simple. Maybe even a little catastrophic.

Put it where you'll see it this week. The mirror, the planner, the lock screen.

If you really want to nail the 'brave enough' part of it, read it out loud to one person you trust.

That's the first plank. You just stood on it.

Walking it together

This September, inside Courageous Leadership Spaces, we begin the Courageous Self-Leadership work: eight planks, from Not Enough to Brave Enough, walked on Zoom one Tiny Brave Step at a time with women doing the same brave thing.

If you've been waiting for a place to start building a bridge to reaching where you really want to go, this is it.

And if you want a thinking partner to help you work what we've talked about through, the Tiny Brave Steps Generator is free and ready. Tell it: Help me name the future I'm not willing to walk into if I stay where I am.

The want can keep waiting until the next blog post.

This first plank is preparing you for that. You really are Brave Enough to do this.