Looking Past Out-There-Ness
When we locate our wanting in ourselves.
A lot of my work out in the world is connecting women with their wanting, in part because we are conditioned to subjugate our wants to other peoples’ needs. Wanting is core to our undiagnosed envy, which I’m pretty convinced is the root of a majority of woman-on-woman hate. This unconscious envy is provoked when we see someone who has something, or is doing something, we want for ourselves and it comes out as… “I just don’t like her,” or “she rubs me the wrong way,” or “who does she think she is.” (The chapter on Envy in On Our Best Behavior is all about this, and I wrote about it at length here, in “Owning Our Wanting” and “How’s the Wanting Going?—the Magic of Group Revelation.” I also wrote about how women are much more comfortable with “covert longing,” i.e. hoping that someone see what they want without any need to make that want overt in “Transactional Relationships & Shadow Vows.”)
As I’ve taken this message and work into the world (sometimes by myself, sometimes with Courtney Smith), I’ve noticed a few pervasive things that derail the potency of getting in touch with what you want.
The first is that we’re much more comfortable wanting something for other people—it’s not unusual to hear women triangulate their wanting by focusing on the people they love. (I want my husband to get a new job, which might be cover for, I want peace and less anxiety, or I want more financial freedom; or I want my child to get into their first-choice school, which might be cover for I want my child to be guaranteed a happy and successful life.) Once you start cleaning this up to find the root want—for yourself—you get the chance to get in touch with the underlying fear: Fear of loss of control, fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety and security. You also get a better handle on the conditions you need to create to be more clearly connected to yourself.
The second thing that’s been emerging is that once we figure out what we want—hard work in of itself—the natural instinct is to shift our focus to who can gave it to us. Specifically, we move from wanting something for ourselves to wanting something from other people. “They,” this person or entity who supposedly holds our fate in their hands, becomes the focus of our attention rather than what’s within our capacity to create for ourselves. (Also, I should add that the focus of this exercise isn’t some sort of direct manifestation experiment or prescription—I want and then I get—it’s more about getting clear with ourselves and moving toward creating something with the universe—something that just might be far greater than what we could actually imagine or articulate at the outset.)
In The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Diana Chapman, Jim Dethmer, and Kaley Klemp write: “Most leaders and most people believe and are deeply committed to the belief that what they want (approval, control and security) is ‘out there.’ Out-there-ness is the belief that my approval, control and security are dependent on someone or something other than myself. Put simply, I don’t have it within me and something or someone needs to give it to me. Out-there-ness leads to ‘if-only-ness.’ If only my boss would appreciate me, then I would have the sense of approval I so desperately want. If only I had an employment contract, I would have the security that I need. If only my child would obey me I would be in control. Unconscious leaders are in the trance of ‘out-there-ness’ and ‘if-only-ness.’ They are driven by them.”
I think this is really big.
Throughout my career, I’ve had a front row seat to other peoples’ “out-there-ness” and “if-only-ness” as many people have wanted things from me, namely press coverage, access to my platform or the brand platform I’ve been programming (i.e., to be on the podcast, to be featured), book blurbs, and other forms of support. I don’t mind an informational pitch, specifically from book publicists giving me an overview of upcoming publications, but I have an allergy to pitches loaded with the energy of “out-there-ness” and “if-only-ness.” These have the insistence of “YOU HAVE SOMETHING I WANT—AND YOU NEED TO GIVE IT TO ME AS THE KEEPER OF MY WANT.” Often, these emails leverage language like, “In the spirit of women supporting other women,” or “I know you really care about women,” which feels pretty manipulative to me—again, it’s not, “This is what I want,” it’s “you should give me what I want, though I’m burying what I want in the statement that my want is in service to all women everywhere…so give me what I want, otherwise you are not supporting women.”
I have a lot of my own work to do around a simply stated “No”—these types of emails will keep coming across my transom until I build this muscle—but that’s not really the point. The point is that we stay stuck in “out-there-ness” and “if-only-ness” when we refuse to own our wants—and not appoint them to anyone else, or any other entity. Only then can you start creating from that place of moving in the direction of your vocation, or your dharma, or that inner GPS. Taking this type of movement is not contingent on any action, from any other being. (I wrote a bit about vocation a few weeks ago, but remember that its etymology is calling.)
Before I sign-off, throwing in this Hale Dowskin quote since I love it (he wrote The Sedona Method): “You cannot go anywhere to get what you already have and you cannot do anything to become what you already are.” So time to be that, right where you are.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
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9/19: Why white people are called Caucasian with Sarah Lewis, PhD
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9/12: On finding our soul’s vocation with James Hollis
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Oof. I feel this. I know intellectually that my wants are just as important as someone else’s… and yet it’s so damn hard to say no sometimes. But when I don’t make self honoring choices then something inside of me is being compromised. I can’t fully show up for people in the way that I would like to.. and I end up feeling resentful.
I’m still on step one trying to define my wants and learning to navigate that internal landscape. Sometimes it feels like searching for my shadow with a flashlight.
Not knowing what I want paves a pretty path to take on the wants of others as my own, sometimes completely oblivious to it (thank you marketing tactics).