E-tip No. 59 – knowing what you want, part 1
In my experience, most people know what they want. It’s just they find it difficult to express.
Or sometimes, they get confused and what seems a good choice one day, the next day seems less so.
So how to solve this?
Well, I thought I’d share with you one of the simplest and most powerful techniques I know to find out what you want, and to make choices between competing options. This works for choosing a house, a job, to finding out what’s important in relationships or life, pretty much anything.
For example, most people look for a job title (lawyer, accountant, project manager), rather than the activities that the job does – meeting people, problem solving, variety, challenges, working in a team or alone (that’s a lawyer, or project manager, or an accountant!). And when you consider it this way, a whole host of opportunities come up. And, now you will have the tools to decide which is best for you.
I call it the Post-it® technique:
Today’s experiment.
· Take a pack of post-it® notes and a pen.
· Hold in your mind, the issue you want to know what’s important to you about – job, house relationship, project, product, life….
· Ask yourself the question: what’s important to me in/about [insert what you want to know about here]
· As the ideas pop up (a word or phrase), quickly write each one down on a separate Post-it® note and keep going with the ideas – just write down whatever pops up.
· If you get stuck, ask yourself: if there was one more thing, what would it be? And write that down. I often find the last things are the most important ones. You’ll usually end up with a stack of 7 – 12 Post-it® notes.
· This is what’s important to you – simple huh?
I have clients, and me included, who still have their post-its and refer to them frequently to make decisions.
I’ll show you next week how to prioritise this stack of notes and use them to make complex decisions and competing options in an incredibly simple way.
Until we meet…
Anthony
©Anthony Davis 2006. All rights reserved
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[...] Last week, I said most people know what they want. It’s just they find it difficult to express. And if you followed Knowing what you want – part 1, you’ll now have a pile of post-it notes containing words and phrases – you now know what you want. Cool huh! [...]
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