011: Three Little Words That Can Mess up Your Life (Part 3)

Today’s topic is about the word “want.” Even though we spent the last two episodes talking about how having preferences is a healthy alternative to imposing “shoulds” or “needs” upon ourselves. I present here three reasons why we fall into some thinking traps when we use the word “want.” Those reasons are:

We don’t really know what is best for us.
We tell ourselves that we want one thing, when evidence points to the contrary.
We mainly know what we don’t want, rather than what we do want.

To summarize this and the last two episodes, I came up with this little quote:

"If you want to know what you want,
                 Look at what you're doing.
 If you want to know what you need,
                 Look at what you’ve got.
 If you want to know what should be,
                 Look at what is."

See Also