A desire is the interface between you and the future. No desire is meaningless or inconsequential. If it pulls you, even a little bit, it will take everyone higher. Every desire deserves your attention – especially the daily, repeating, seemingly small desires that circulate in your heart and mind.
This is the single most practical reason to get clear on your core desired feelings: you can make small improvements to your being and your life, on a daily basis.
You don’t need to quit your job, necessarily. Or learn Spanish, or a whole new meditation practice, or a seven-step system. You don’t need to make a phone call to clear the air with the person who did you wrong ten years ago. You don’t even need to be super bold.
To feel the way you want to feel as often as possible, you just need to do easy things to help you feel that way — every day. Easy.
One of my core desired feelings is “divinely feminine.” But I’m not going take up belly dancing or lead goddess circles in my living room. Because, a) I’m an introvert, and b) my life is full. When I think about what I can do to generate “divinely feminine” on a day-to-day basis — among all the other things I have put on my plate — it has to be really simple and doable. And natural.
Easy stuff: I can reread a chapter of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves. Make sure to keep my tea date with my girlfriend. Get tickets to Katy Perry when she’s in town. One day I just Googled “divine feminine” and kept some goddess images I found on my computer for the day.
On the days when I’m just not feeling very Sexy Wonder Woman Kali Mama Goddess Power Chica, divinely feminine can be as simple as opting to wear a skirt instead of yoga pants. And that small, sometimes simple, choice for feeling good can change the way I feel all day.
On one particularly broke day, I was feeling anything but affluent. Credit cards were full, rent was due, and the phone hadn’t been ringing with new business that week. What’ll make me feel better off? I thought. What will I do when I am actually bringing in the bucks? Answer: I’ll buy that Italian linen sofa at Inform! So I headed down to that snooty furniture store in the hip part of town and I sat my ass on that sofa—for a conspicuously long time. This is what affluence feels like — quality, I thought. And I felt a bit better. I felt a little more possible. Which made me feel more like myself. And instead of focusing on feeling broke, I shifted my focus to going after what I wanted. It was just a small, but effective, thing to get me out of my funk and back to feeling inspired to make things happen again.
Small, deliberate actions inspired by your true desires create a life you love.
When you’re not feeling the way you want to feel, it can take just a small gesture to shift your state of mind. I have a friend who’s a freelance writer, and she’s made a habit of giving stuff away when she’s feeling lacking. “I pay for dinner with a friend, even if things are tight for me, or I do some writing work pro bono. It opens my heart up, and money seems to flow better when I’m feeling more generous about life.”
Seek out environments that match your desired feelings. I know someone who goes to test drive new cars when she’s feeling shabby. Meander around open house showings for homes that are currently out of your price range. Go to an art gallery and be in the midst of transcendent, priceless art.
You can change your life daily, practically, through small, deliberate actions.
@DanielleLaPorte (Click to Tweet!)
Let the beauty and the power rub off on you. The idea is that you do easy, natural things that are aligned with your core desired feelings. These small, steady actions won’t change your life in a flash, but they will change your life day by day.
– Excerpted from The Desire Map
Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.
Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.
