Core Desired Feelings
Have you heard of Danielle Laporte’s Desire Map? It’s a rather fabulous book, with a fascinating concept - instead of setting New Year’s resolutions based on goals or tasks to complete, set the feelings that you’d like to cultivate. I tend to Desire Map between Christmas and New Year’s, and again on my birthday, as it’s close enough to a half year mark to serve as a good review period.
The full process has a workbook that accompanies the book. I went for a shortened process, since I’ve been doing this for years and was just doing my mid-year tune up. I looked through each of the sections suggested in her workbook (such as career, family, wellness, etc), and generated a beginning list of feelings based on that. My initial list had 100 entries.
One-hundred.
Yeah, there were a lot. A handful of them were either duplicates or variations on the same theme. At this point, I start narrowing the list down. I try to eliminate all of the duplicates, as well as eliminating or changing anything that requires input from other people (such as changing trusted to trust). After much culling, I was left with 18. Still too many. I paired similar feelings together, and started asking pointed questions - What does this mean to me? What is this really about? What would I feel like if I were (blank)? What would my life look like if I were (blank)? In addition to that, some of the more difficult ones led me to just say the word out loud, repeatedly, and see how it felt in my body. Some I immediately knew were right, and many more immediately felt wrong. After all this, I was left with the following:
Authentic
Delight
Intuitive
Pleasure
I’m very happy with this list. Two are new, two I’ve previously seen. The second half of 2018 is full of promise and excitement.
What about you, have you ever done anything like this? If so, what are your words?
