I have a confession. I want my work to be poetry: sonorous beauty that evokes and transforms.

I want to create, to express. I want to witness beauty and share its wonder.

I want to write and paint. I want to sing.

These are the desires true to my very nature.

Much of the rest of what I (say I) want, whether it’s the shape and size of my business, the style and schedule of my work, or the desire to gaze at the sea from my door with the breeze in my hair, can be reduced to these deeper, more fundamental desires.

There are many ways for our deepest desires to be fulfilled—and yet, we tend to focus instead on what we think we want: the surface details of this type of offering, this many clients, this level of revenue, this house, this vacation, etc.

Under the business and revenue goals, under the type of work you want to create, under the lifestyle you want to live, is a deeper set of desires rising to the surface through the lens of your mind (which frankly, wears the blinders of the known).

What is the desire under your desire?

If you keep asking, what’s under that, and what’s under that, what is so fundamental that it makes you you?

How can you design your work and your business to support those deepest desires?

Here’s what I mean . . . straight from my personal journal:

I want my work to be poetry: sonorous beauty that evokes and transforms.
I want to create, to express. I want to witness beauty and share its wonder.
I want to write and paint. I want to sing.
I want to connect.
I want to help people transform into their truest, shiniest selves.
I want to travel. I want to be mobile.
I want my work to matter.
I want fluidity, rhythm and a good amount of variety.
I want energy, structures and systems to work for me.
I want to live and work in flow.
I want financial abundance and stability.
I want simplicity.
I want spaciousness.

Even from that short, non-outcome-specific list of desires, I know that only handful of them are the core of who I am. The rest are natural outgrowths necessary to support my deepest, fundamental desires.

This means certain things for my work and my business. Specifically, if I want it to express richness, beauty and poetry in a way that I experience as spacious and fluid and that offers profound transformation, simplicity and structures need to do the heavy lifting. In vision and in action, simplicity and structures are my mantras and my guides. (Poetry comes naturally.)

What about you?

What is the desire under your desire?

What does focusing on fulfilling those most fundamental desires mean for your work and your business?

{I’m here to talk.}

You Might Also Like: