Do you know why you want what you want?

"I know I could get it. I'm just not sure that I really want it."

So went the questioning musings of a close friend as she walked through her open space, laptop in hand, earbuds in, mulling over via a virtual screen the very real dilemma of whether or not she truly wants a job she's been interviewing for.

It's a big job. A very big job in a very big organisation. The kind of job that says to everyone watching "I'm someone". The kind of job that comes with the trappings of professional success: status, power, salary, title, and territory.

But it also comes with politics. And long hours. And stress. And struggle.

She's not sure she wants it, and rightly so.

Nothing is free. And this is the kind of job that, despite the lucrative compensation, comes at a price.

When making decisions about our best next steps in our careers and life in general, we ignore those embedded costs at our peril.

What I love about this friend of mine is that she is acutely aware of her foibles and frailties: the profoundly human aspects of ourselves that sometimes trigger us to make terrible decisions and behave irrationally, often to our detriment, and occasionally to the bewilderment of the people around us

Contrary to what a lot of less self-aware and less mindful individuals might do, which is jump head-first at the opportunity, blinded by the upside and with not a care for any of the potential downsides, she's asking herself "Why do I want this?".

And I love that about her.

“Never risk what you have and need for what we don't have and don't need.” - Warren Buffet

She's my kind of people: the ones who, like me, are learning to know themselves better by being willing and curious enough to ask these kinds of questions.

Introspection requires a particular flavour of courage with which we are not all equally endowed from the get-go. But it is not a privilege reserved to only an enlightened few. No, on the contrary. I have come to understand that we can all build introspective bravery.

I won't lie, it's not easy. But in terms of the quality of being that ensues, the inner calm, the congruence, and the alignment, I can stand testimony to the effort being wholly worth every shade of discomfort that envelops us along the way.

Self-knowledge is a buildable skill accessible to every one of us because, out of all the things we own, our inner worlds are more uniquely and inalienably ours than anything else we possess.

The only price of admission is being willing to go inwards and accept what we find when we lift the cover of our deepest selves.

“If you are not in the process of becoming the person you want to be, you are automatically engaged in becoming the person you don’t want to be." — Dale Carnegie

The questions my friend is asking herself are ones that I also ask myself frequently:

• When is enough striving enough?
• Do I want this for myself?
• Or is there someone else I am trying to impress?
• And if I am trying to impress someone else, are they worth it?
• Are they even watching?

It boils down to needing a reliable set of deeply personal metrics to determine and appraise what matters most to each of us, and to be brave enough to stake a claim to assert their validity even - and especially - if others around us neither understand nor approve.

We need to be clear with ourselves about what we really want.

For ourselves.

For the person inside ourselves that only we can satisfy.

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get." - Dale Carnegie

So, how do we measure that we have tried hard enough? What level of extrinsic success qualifies as adequate? More importantly, how can we achieve that elusive level of inner contentment that nobody else can see and that allows us to feel full and live in joy and plenitude?

For me, I direct my decisions and measure their appropriateness in terms of how my body feels. It's in my heart rate that isn't speeding. It's in my belly that isn't churning. It's readable on my skin that isn't red and irritated. It's in my back and neck and shoulders that aren't aching and my head that isn't pounding.

It's in realising that the desperate hollow feeling of 'not enough', of not being enough, that I carried in between my ribs for so many years is no longer there.

It's in being able to be alone with myself, doing nothing with nobody, and feeling good about it.

That in itself is its own reward.

So friend, my wish for you is this: be brave and look inside. Be gentle with what you find. Handle yourself with care. And ask if what you are striving for is really what you want.

Are the peaks that you are scaling peaks of your choosing? Or are you striving to climb mountains that belong to somebody else's articulation of ambition, incorrectly correlated with your true desire for success and happiness?

We have but one wild, beautiful life. Let's do our best to live it on terms that are our own.

?AJ