Who the hell told you that's what you wanted?

I spent 20 years trying to create the life I wanted. There was just one problem.

What If You’ve Been Dreaming Somebody Else’s Dreams?

There she sits at the kitchen table with her magazines, scissors, glue stick, and a big piece of poster board.

She’s making a vision board.

She’s supposed to fill it with pictures of everything she wants in life.

A beautiful home. Exotic vacations. A handsome companion. Perhaps a thin woman strolling along a beach wearing $400 worth of flowing white linen.

But there’s one little problem.

She doesn’t know what she wants.

Oh, she knows what a happy life is supposed to look like. She’s been shown pictures of it all her life.

But is that what SHE wants?

I spent 20 damn years keeping journals, visualizing, meditating, making vision boards, and listening to people tell me how to create the life I wanted.

And for much of that time, I kept saying the same thing.

“I don’t know what I want.”

It never occurred to me that I might have spent so many years living according to other people’s expectations that I’d lost touch with my own desires.

Think about it.

We were taught to be good girls. To be responsible. To put others first. To be realistic. To consider what people might think.

We learned what a good wife should want. What a good mother should want. What a successful woman should want.

And somewhere along the way, we stopped asking ourselves what WE wanted.

That’s conditioning.

And here’s the really frightening part.

Eventually, nobody has to tell you what you can’t do. You start telling yourself.

I caught myself doing exactly that when I learned my apartment building might someday become condominiums.

I immediately decided I couldn’t afford to buy mine.

I hadn’t asked the price. I hadn’t investigated anything.

I’d simply decided it was impossible.

Then somebody asked me, “What makes you think you couldn’t buy it?”

Well, I’ll be damned.

I’d eliminated an entire possibility without knowing a single fact about it.

And it made me wonder how many other possibilities I’ve dismissed over the years.

How many dreams have we abandoned because we were taught they weren’t practical, appropriate, or possible?

How many things did we stop wanting because wanting them seemed selfish?

And how many dreams have we forgotten we ever had?

That’s what I find so fascinating about this stage of life.

We’re finally free of so many obligations that shaped our earlier years.

But freedom doesn’t automatically erase decades of conditioning.

We still have to recognize the old rules we’re carrying around.

Especially the ones we never knew were rules.

So before you make another vision board, plan your next chapter, or decide what the rest of your life ought to look like, I’d like you to consider one question.

Is this what I really want, or is this what I’ve been taught to want?

Because there’s a big difference between building the life you’re supposed to have and discovering the life you actually want.

And at our age, don’t you think it’s about damn time we found out?

But I can almost hear you saying, “That’s all well and good, Monica, but how do I figure out what I really want when I’ve spent most of my life listening to everybody else?”

Well, there’s where we begin.

By learning to trust ourselves again.

And that’s not always easy when we’ve spent decades questioning our own judgment, dismissing our desires, and asking everybody else what they think we ought to do.

It’s one of the reasons I created Building Believable Trust, a guide to help you begin rebuilding that relationship with yourself and your intuition.

I’d love to get it into your hands.

And today, October 31, is the last day to become a paid member at 20% off. When you join, Building Believable Trust is my gift to you.

Because I don’t just want you reading about reclaiming your life. I want you to experience what happens when you begin trusting yourself enough to live it.

Become a member, save 20%, and receive your gift

And now, I’m curious. Have you ever realized that something you thought you wanted wasn’t really your dream at all? I’d love to hear your story.

And now, I’m curious. Have you ever realized that something you thought you wanted wasn’t really your dream at all? I’d love to hear your story.

I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever realized that something you thought you wanted wasn’t really your dream at all?