Let’s say you weather your particular storm of uncertainty, disruption, and difficulty brought on by the pandemic.
Or under more ordinary circumstances, you finish that novel or boat or scrapbook you’ve been working on for ages—or find true love—or build your dream house—or win your black belt—or master high-altitude baking—or whatever it is you’re aiming for. So what?
All those things are objectives. They’re quantifiable. There are many tried-and-true, evidence-based tools and techniques to help you achieve them. But even if you achieve them, so what? What difference will it make in your life? More importantly, what difference do you want it to make? What’s your desired outcome—and how juicy is it?
Desired outcomes are not quantifiable. You’ll know you’re there when you experience it. Even so, there is much you can learn about pursuing juicy desired outcomes—about going after something that really matters to you but that you aren’t sure you can get and don’t know exactly what it will look or feel like once you have it—something that just might be transformative.
But if you can’t identify your juicy desired outcomes in the first place, all that information and all those tools are useless.
And if you can’t identify your juicy desired outcomes, to paraphrase poet Mary Oliver, what are you doing with your one wild and precious life? Waiting for it to pass? Our current circumstances remind us that that can be arranged—possibly sooner rather than later.
The reluctance or inability to identify juicy desired outcomes affects us as individuals. But it also severely limits our ability to solve the complex problems we face as a species and to create a world in which it’s possible for more people to live satisfying and meaningful lives—a state of affairs that would benefit everyone.
So What’s Stopping YOU?
There are a surprising number of obstacles in the way of identifying juicy desired outcomes. How many of these do you recognize?
- Holding back (failing to fully commit yourself—to anything)
- Trying to maintain a balanced life
- Failing to use your imagination
- Focusing on fixing instead of on creating
- Turning wants into needs
- Applying feasibility criteria instead of desirability criteria
- An unreliable sense of personal agency
- Choosing immediate gratification over long-term satisfaction
- Playing small
- Holding out for a guarantee
- Searching for your life purpose/passion/path
- Complacency
- The belief that your brain is merely reporting on objective reality
- Fear of failure
- A low tolerance for uncertainty and frustration
- Letting your brain use you (instead of you using it)
- Addiction to productivity
- Engaging in self-rumination rather than self-reflection
- Having a be good vs. get better mindset
- Watching from the bleachers instead of getting out on the field and into the game
- The belief that pursuing juicy desired outcomes is selfish
- Expecting approval from others
- A desire to “look good” or maintain a particular persona
- Failing to understand you can’t get more information or see things from a different perspective until you change your position (take action)
- That well-worn excuse you’ve been using for years
Juicy Desired Outcomes in the Time of Coronavirus
How does the current state of the world impact your ability to identify juicy desired outcomes? Well, because so many of our objectives are more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve right now, this is a perfect time to practice identifying juicy desired outcomes. What difference would achieving your original objective make in your life? Why do you want it? How would it change your status quo? How would it feel? What would it be like? Once you can answer those questions and determine what you were really after, you may be able to come up with some other ways to get that.
There’s almost always more than one way to achieve a desired outcome.
That’s the purpose of an objective: to get a desired outcome, not the other way around. As I described in my story in the last newsletter, my juicy desired outcome was to have a satisfying and meaningful relationship with my partner, not to maintain our marriage. The marriage was an objective that wasn’t getting us what we wanted. By ending it, we moved closer to our desired outcome.
An additional benefit to identifying and pursuing juicy desired outcomes is that it trains your brain to overcome the factors in that list above, all of which radically diminish the quality of life for us and the people around us.
We have a big brain capable of greatness. There’s no time like the present to use it!