104. "I Don't Know What I Want": How to Get Clarity When You Feel Stuck

Holly Toscanini: Can I tell you something I've noticed after years of working with women? I don't know what I want almost always shows up at the most inconvenient times. Like when you're lying awake at 3 a.m. thinking about your relationship, your job, your life and realizing you can't quite remember the last time someone asked you what you wanted and you had an actual answer. Or when a friend announces she's starting over, new career, new city, whatever, and you feel this weird cocktail of happiness for her and something that feels uncomfortably close to envy. Or when someone puts you on the spot and asks, what do you want? And your brain just goes quiet? Well, here's what I've come to believe after working with a lot of women in this exact place. Most of you are not confused. mean, women know more than we're letting ourselves say. And today we're going to talk about why I don't know what I want has become your default answer and how to start telling yourself the truth again. Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm your host, Holly Toscanini. And this is the show where we get honest about all the ways we put our own lives on hold and it actually looks like to stop doing that. ⁓ This episode is for you if any of this sounds familiar. I don't know what I want anymore. I know something needs to change, but I can't even name what it is. Or I'm not miserable, I'm just not quite alive either. We're gonna dig into why that happens, why genuinely smart, self-aware women like you end up feeling like strangers to their own desires, and we're gonna make this practical, because by the end, you're gonna have something real you can do today, not someday. And at the end of the episode, I'll tell you about the Unwaiting Quick Start mini course, a short, focused experience I created for exactly this moment, when you're done thinking about it and ready to actually move. I want to start by saying something clearly because I think it needs to be said. Not knowing what you want is not a personality flaw or a weakness in your character. It's not a sign that you're unfocused or that other women have something figured out that you just don't. The women who come to me saying, I don't know what I want are not vague or directionless. They're almost without exception the most responsible people in the room. The ones who can read a situation in seconds and anticipate everybody's needs and quietly make sure everything runs smoothly. They're brilliant at taking care of everything and everyone except themselves. So when the question turns inward, when someone asks, okay, but what do you want? The clarity evaporates. Why? Because most of us were raised in environments where having strong preferences labeled us as difficult or bossy, where being flexible and low maintenance got us approval, or at least less friction. Where asking for what we wanted felt like a risk just not worth taking. And then on top of that, there's diet culture, which spent years teaching us to override our hunger and distrust our body. and a version of productivity culture that prizes what you can produce over what you actually feel. And the particular kind of pressure that lands on women to be pleasant and helpful and just easy to deal with. None of that is your fault, but it does add up. What it adds up to is women who have gotten very good at suppressing the question of what we want, because at some point asking that question out loud felt dangerous. Because if you told the truth, you might have to change something, disappoint somebody. or stop performing a version of yourself that other people are very comfortable with. So your nervous system found a workaround. It learned to say, I don't know, I don't know, keeps the peace. It keeps everything in place. It is genuinely a self-protective response until the cost of not knowing starts to feel heavier than the cost of admitting you do. That's usually the moment women find me. And I guess it's somewhere close to why you're listening to this right now. So if I don't know is a productive response, what is it protecting you from anyway? In my experience, it's usually one of three things. The first is you're afraid of what happens if you admit it. Sometimes you actually do have a sense of what you want. To work differently, to have a relationship that feels alive, to stop the cycle you've been in with your body for the last 20 or 30 years, to move or create or leave something or finally start something. But right behind that awareness comes a wave that says, that's selfish, that's unrealistic, that would hurt people. I'm too far in to change direction now. So instead of sitting with the discomfort of wanting something you're not sure you can have, you go back to, I don't know what I want. It's less painful in the short term. The second is you can see what you want, but you can't see how to get there without blowing something up. This is the version that sounds like, I kind of know. I just can't see how to do it without everything else in my life falling apart. And because you can't see the whole path, you've decided that desire doesn't count. That if you don't have a plan, a fully fleshed out plan, you don't really know. But that's not how desire works. Desire doesn't come prepackaged with a five year strategy. It shows up as a nudge, a quiet ache, a thought you keep having and keep pushing it away. You don't have to know the whole path to honor the direction your heart wants to go. And the third, and this one's especially common for women in midlife, is that you feel guilty for wanting more. You have a life, a real one, maybe a partner, kids, a home, work that pays the bills. And somewhere along the way, you absorb the idea that wanting more than that means you're ungrateful, that a good person, a good woman should just be satisfied. So instead of saying, I want more than this and I'm scared to say it, you say, I don't know what I want. It feels less offensive, even if just to yourself. Now, none of this means you need to torture life. It means the confusion is doing its job. And once you understand what that job is, you can start to ask more honest questions. Not, what do I want? But what am I afraid to want? Because here's the thing about desire. It doesn't disappear just because you've stopped listening. It reroutes. It finds other ways to get your attention. And once you know what to look for, you start to realize you've been getting the signals for quite a while. Now the first one might be jealousy. And I know that word makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but stay with me through this. Because when you feel that particular twinge watching someone else, she quit her corporate job and moved abroad, or she started painting at 52, or she finally left, she finally stayed, and she did the thing. Jealousy is not proof that you're petty. It's a highlighter pen. You know, it's pointing at something in you that's saying, pay attention here. This means something. And this question isn't, why am I jealous of her life? The question is, what does her choice represent to me? Is it freedom? Is it permission? Is it more time? Is it a version of myself I keep telling myself it's too late to hope for? See, that's not envy. That's information. Now, the second clue is irritation, specifically the kind that shows up around women who set limits, say no without a lengthy explanation or take up space without apologizing for it. And before you write her off, try asking, is there a part of me that wishes I could do that too? Because sometimes the people who bother us the most are modeling something our nervous system doesn't yet feel safe doing. Now, the third clue is your daydreams. Not the vision board version, the ones that sneak up on you in the car or the shower in the middle of a meeting you're not really paying attention to, living somewhere different. doing work that doesn't feel like a drain, having mornings that don't start in a panic, a relationship where you actually feel like yourself, time, just unstructured, unproductive time that belongs to nobody else but you. Those scenes are not random and they're not silly. They're your mind trying to show you something. Now the fourth clue is your someday list. Listen for how often you might say, Someday I'd love to travel. Someday I'll take that class. Someday when things settle down. Someday is how we domesticate desire. We give it a little pat and say, yes, that's lovely, but not now. Go sit in the corner and wait. But here's what I want you to notice. You do not say someday about the things you genuinely don't care about. The fact that it keeps showing up means it means something to you. So start writing down your someday lists. Not as a to-do list, just a record. Because that list is a map of your unlived life and it deserves to be seen. Okay, so let's make this practical, shall we? Because the goal isn't to psychoanalyze your way out of clarity or your way into clarity. It's to start actually rebuilding the muscle of knowing and naming what you want. Now the practice I want to share is the three micro desires a day. And it goes like this. Your nervous system is already a little suspicious of desire. So if you go straight to, do I want my entire life? It's going to freeze. But if you ask yourself, if you say, what do I want right now? In this small moment, it can actually feel safe enough to answer that. So we start absurdly small. I mean, tea or coffee, what do you want? The comfy chair or the couch? Which is it going to be? Music or silence on that walk? You decide. These are not beneath you. These are the beginning of a conversation with yourself that you've probably been avoiding for a very long time. And here's how this whole thing works. Three times a day, pause, set a reminder if that helps, and ask yourself, what do I actually want right now? Not the impressive answer, it's just you here. Not the responsible answer, again, it's just you here. The real answer. Maybe it's, just want a glass of water. Maybe it's five minutes alone before you answer to anybody else. Or maybe it's, want to finish this one thing before I start the next. Maybe it's, I want to be off this call. You name it. Even if you don't act on it immediately. Got it? The naming itself matters. And at least once a day, not every time, just once, actually honor what you want. You step outside for two minutes because you wanted air. You put the phone down and read for five minutes because it's what you actually wanted to do. You say no to something small because your gut said no first. What you're doing isn't trivial. You're spending and sending yourself a little message. Okay. When you tell me what you want, I listen. That's the message. Don't automatically override yourself. That is how you start to rebuild self-trust. Not with a grand gesture, but with these tiny, small micro-move repeated actions that create proof that you take yourself seriously. And after a week of this, look back at your notes. What is showing up again and again? If you keep wanting quiet, that's pointing somewhere. If you keep wanting connection or creativity or rest or honesty, that's not random. Those patterns are bigger desires trying to surface. They're just dressed up in these little tiny ordinary moments. You can't keep saying, just don't know after a week of trying this, because you're going to have evidence. It's going to be right there in your own handwriting. Now there's a moment in this work that's quiet, but so significant. It's the moment when you stop negotiating with yourself and just say it. Not to anybody else, just to you. I want one evening this week that's mine. I want a door I can close. I want to stop pretending this is enough. I want to try the thing I've been calling unrealistic for the last six years. You don't have to announce it. You don't have to have a plan either. You don't have to be ready or perfect. You just have to stop lying to yourself about what you want. Because every time you say, don't know when you actually do know, you're training yourself to distrust your own instincts. You're teaching yourself that your desires aren't safe to have, let alone act on. And every time you admit what you want, even to just yourself, even in a journal nobody's ever going to read, you're doing the opposite. You're saying, I'm allowed to have desires and they don't have to be convenient or perfectly timed or approved by anybody. They're mine. That is unweighting at its most foundational level. It's not glamorous. There's no moment where confetti falls because you finally admitted you want something different. But in those small acts of honesty, they accumulate, you know, the woman who lets herself want things and honors even a few of them gradually becomes a woman who is confident enough. to trust herself, and a woman who trusts herself moves differently through the world. She's less likely to sign up for another decade of some day. She's less likely to keep waiting for a version of herself that's somehow more ready, more certain, more deserving. She just moves, imperfectly, sometimes messy, and oftentimes scared that she moves. And that's what we're working for. That's what we're gonna do. If there's one thing I want you to carry out of this episode, it's this. You are not a woman who doesn't know what she wants. You are a woman who was very well trained to act like she doesn't know. That distinction matters because one of those is a fixed state and the other is something you can change. And not by overhauling your entire life, but by starting to listen to yourself just a little differently. So if you're up for it, here's your homework. For the next three days, try the three micro desires practice. Three times a day, pause and ask yourself what you really want in this moment right now. Honor at least one of those desires every day. And at the end of day three, look at what kept showing up. and circle the one desire that feels the most persistent, the most alive. And then ask yourself, what is one small step, one micro move I could take towards this? Not a step that fixes everything, of course, but a step that proves I'm not just filing this away under some day again. And if you want help with that last part, especially actually naming what you want in one specific area of your life and getting clear on a next real step. That's exactly what the Unwaiting Quick Start Guide is for. It's a short, focused mini course and guide that you're gonna be able to work through in about a day, a single day, an hour if you're quick about it. You'll be able to pick one area of your life where you've been waiting. You'll get honest about what you actually want there as the woman you are right now, not the future better prepared version of you, the one you are now. And you're gonna work through the fears and the I don't know patterns that are keeping you stuck. Plus you're gonna walk away with one clear doable action, one clear micro move you can take in the next 24 hours. No, this isn't a sweeping overhaul. It's not a 27 module commitment. It's just a guided, here's where I start. I'll put the link in the show notes so it's easy to find. Remember, it's the unweighting quick start, mini guide and course. Thank you for spending this time with me. Honestly, it means something that showed up that you showed up for this. So. Until next time, trust what keeps tugging at you. Honor even the small, strange desires. And remember, there's nothing left to wait for. Until next time, bye for now.