Most of the people I coach come in saying they don't know what they want.
It's the most common opening line in this work. "I just need to figure out what I actually want." I've said it myself, on and off, for the better part of a decade.
But here's something I've noticed sitting across the table from a lot of smart, accomplished people now.
Most of them are completely clear on something else.
They know what they don't want.
The "figure out what I want" trap
"I just need to figure out what I want" sounds like a clear next step. It's not.
It's actually one of the most paralysing questions you can ask yourself, because it assumes the answer is sitting somewhere fully formed, waiting to be discovered like a fossil.
Most of us were taught to operate this way. Pick a major. Pick a job. Pick a partner. Pick a city. As if the right answer was already written down in invisible ink and our only job was to read carefully enough.
So when life shifts, and the old answers stop fitting, we go back to the same script. We try harder to see the invisible ink. We sit in cafes with empty notebooks. We take vacations to "think." We make and remake five-year plans.
And we stay stuck.
What you're probably already clear on
Try this. Don't think too hard about it.
What's something you know, with your whole body, that you don't want anymore?
For some people it's "I don't want to manage another team I didn't pick." For others it's "I don't want to spend another winter in this city." Or "I don't want to pretend the work is interesting." Or "I don't want my next decade to look like my last one."
That kind of clarity is right under the surface. Most people just don't trust it because it doesn't come with a destination attached.
Here's the thing. Clarity doesn't have to point forward. It can point away.
Antonio's story
Antonio Ortega Garcia spent years in a corporate career in Spain. From the outside, it looked great. Title, salary, trajectory.
He didn't leave because he had a brilliant new vision for his life. He left because he could no longer pretend the existing one fit.
What came next wasn't a clean masterplan. It was Malaga, conversations, experiments, a new way of moving. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. He kept moving.
When I sat down with him for episode 16 of 50 Lunches, what struck me wasn't his clarity about what he wanted. It was his honesty about what he didn't.
That gave him something most "I just need to figure out what I want" people lack. Direction. Even before the destination existed.
Why subtraction is faster than addition
There's a useful idea in philosophy called the via negativa. The negative way. The discipline of arriving at truth by stripping away what isn't, instead of trying to construct what is.
It works in life design too.
If you list ten things you want, you'll second-guess every item. They sound good in theory. You're not sure if they're really yours, or if you absorbed them from someone else along the way.
If you list ten things you don't want, the list comes out faster, and it's almost always more honest.
"I don't want to manage anyone for the next five years."
"I don't want to optimise my life for income I don't get to enjoy."
"I don't want to keep being the person who quietly tolerates work that bores me."
You're not building a roadmap with this list. You're drawing a fence around the territory you're done with. And the field that remains is suddenly much smaller and much more navigable.
When confusion is just fear with better PR
One thing I've noticed... a lot of "I'm confused about what I want" is actually fear, dressed up nicer.
Confusion is socially acceptable. Fear is not. So we file the fear under confusion and tell ourselves we just need more information.
You don't need more information. You need to admit the part you already know.
That you don't want to keep doing this. That you don't want to wait another year. That you don't want to discover, at sixty, that the version of your life you were working toward wasn't actually yours.
The discomfort of admitting that is real. But the discomfort of not admitting it is the one quietly costing you decades.
An inversion that helps
My friend Pontus Holmgren, a Swedish psychologist, talks about "moving toward what scares you" as a compass. The thing that scares you is usually the thing pointing toward growth.
Pair that with via negativa, and you get something useful.
What you don't want tells you what to subtract. What scares you tells you where to lean. Together they map the territory better than any "find your passion" exercise has ever managed.
Most people skip step one. They try to leap into something inspiring before they've actually closed the door behind them on what they're outgrowing. So they end up with a half-step. A new job that looks different but feels familiar. A move that changes the city but not the patterns.
A small exercise to try this week
You don't need an off-site or a journal retreat for this. Twenty minutes will do.
Write down ten things you don't want anymore. Don't filter. Don't qualify. Don't add "...but I'm grateful for X."
Then circle the three that have the most charge. The ones that gave you a little jolt as you wrote them down.
Those three are the start of your direction.
You don't have a plan yet. That's fine. A plan that comes out of clarity about what you don't want will be far more honest than one that comes out of pressure to declare what you do.
Direction first. Destination later. That's how this work actually goes.
Where to take this next
If you want a structured way to look at this, the Life Report is a decent place to start. It surfaces where you're spending energy on things you've already mentally checked out of. The gap between effort and care is often the first thing that lands on the "don't want" list.
And if you want to think it through with someone who's been here, that's what coaching is for. :)
