Ask someone what they want and, more often than you’d expect, you’ll get a vague answer, or a description of what they don’t want instead. This isn’t because people are shallow or indecisive by nature. It’s because knowing what you want, in specific and honest terms, is genuinely harder than it looks, and most of us have never been asked to sit with the question properly.

Why a Vague Answer Feels Safer

Part of the difficulty is that wanting something clearly requires being willing to be disappointed if you don’t get it. A vague or hedged answer protects against that risk — if you never quite named what you wanted, you can’t quite fail to get it. This is a completely understandable defence, but it comes at a cost: without a clear answer to “what do I want,” every decision downstream becomes harder, because there’s no clear standard to measure options against.

Trading Abstraction for Specificity

Getting a genuine answer usually isn’t about more thinking — it’s about more specificity. “I want to be happy” or “I want more freedom” are true, but too abstract to actually decide anything by. The more useful version of the question is something closer to: what, specifically, would need to be true for you to know you were experiencing that? What would you be doing, or not doing, in a normal Tuesday, if this were already the case? Vague wants resist decision-making. Specific, sensory-grounded wants make decisions almost obvious by comparison. Formal goal-setting research reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: specific goals consistently outperform vague ones.

When the Muscle for Wanting Has Gone Unused

There’s also a quieter obstacle worth naming: sometimes people genuinely don’t know what they want because they’ve spent so long organising their life around what they don’t want — avoiding failure, avoiding disapproval, avoiding risk — that the muscle for wanting something positively and directly has gone unused. If that’s the case, the answer won’t come quickly, and that’s fine. It’s worth treating as a real question to work on, not a quick prompt to answer on the spot.

This question — genuinely, specifically, what do you want — sits at the centre of the MythoSelf Process, because almost every other piece of coaching work becomes clearer once it’s been answered honestly.

If you’d like support working through it properly, our Services page outlines how that process works.