What Do I Want?

I have a journaling practice. It helps me to think through what is going on in my life, what I am doing, what I could do better, what is going well.

I have made it a regular practice to write journal entries under the heading, “What do I want?”

I do several variations on the exercise. One version is to write an entry on the topic every day for a week. I try answering it from different angles and to different degrees of detail.

It can be useful to distill the journal entries down to single sentence or even single word answers. I find it provides a sort of mantra; a clear mental framework for what I’m doing at a given moment.

One variation of the exercise is to ask, “What do I want as a…?” This helps me to sort out feelings and thoughts. It helps me to prioritize…