S01E14 Stop Settling: The Power of Wanting More

In this episode, we challenge the epidemic of apathy that has settled over many people's lives. Acknowledging our desires is essential for personal and collective growth. Wanting more isn't ungrateful or selfish but a starting point for all meaningful change. When we silence our desires to be "realistic" or avoid disappointment, we don't just limit ourselves; we lower the ceiling for everyone around us.

Laura emphasizes that apathy keeps us small while wanting fuels creation and innovation. Every improvement in history started with someone saying "there has to be another way." You don't need a complete plan or permission to acknowledge what you want, small acknowledgments of desire can create significant change over time. This episode invites you to identify where you've been talking yourself out of wanting more and to consider trusting that desire.

Transcript

0:07

Hello everyone. Welcome back to a life in color. It is here where I am in my office. It's warm and cozy inside. The lights are all on and is glowing, and I have my hot tea, but out the window it is cold and rainy. Just one of those miserable January days where you're out of holidays to look forward to and. Now you're just full on in winter mode, but it's not snowing. It doesn't snow here anymore. I just got back from my son's basketball game. Here's something to know about me. Not only was I never an athlete, I never played a sport growing up. I did ballet classes and I was a musician. Okay? I was in the marching band. That's the closest thing I did to a sport, which was very physically demanding, but not a team sport. so not only did I never play sports, but I also don't really watch sports, or I didn't until recently, I guess. So every time my kids play a different sport, I have to start from scratch and learn the rules and learn what to cheer for. I have to learn what to cheer. Sometimes I yell things that don't make any sense, and I just have to hope that nobody heard it. Sometimes I accidentally cheer for the wrong thing. It's a mess. Now my son is playing basketball, which is my husband's sport. He knows it inside and out. I know nothing. Okay, so we go to the game today, and there was some kind of issue. My husband runs the book where he records who's playing and who makes shots and whatever, usually at the same table as him, someone sits next to him and runs the scoreboard and the timer. And I guess there was a shortage of people today and nobody had stepped up. So the ref was over there talking to him about like, can you do both? he called to me. And called me to come over and bring my stuff. So I, knowing nothing about the rules at all of basketball, had to run the timer and the scoreboard for the game. Listen, I don't know when the timer starts and stops, aside from if a whistle blows, it's pretty obvious that it has to stop. But when it starts again. Mysterious. I never even thought about it before. So rather than just watching my kid play and trying to figure out the rules, and if everybody's doing a good job and cheering for them to win, I had to pay very close attention today, guys, to everything that happened. I learned a lot though. I feel very comfortable with this now. I feel like I can safely say I nailed it. Now I could do this confidently going forward, but man, that was a learning curve and I was laughing just sitting there with him. I can do it when my husband is sitting next to me. Let me clarify, he was sitting right next to me so he could say like two points for the other team or stop the clock or whatever. So I did have a coach with me doing that, but that was my adventure for today. Okay. Today I wanna talk about something that is becoming very obvious to me. I think a lot of us are feeling this right now, but nobody is saying it out loud. Lately as I have been scrolling online and talking to my friends, hanging out with my family and friends at the beach, even watching the world as it is occurring around me, I am sensing that there is a pretty heavy fog of apathy that has settled in to everyone. People are kind of shrugging off big issues. They are settling for good enough in their careers or their lives, and when you bring it up and you ask about how they feel, they just shrug it off. I mean, I don't love it, but what can I do? It is what it is. That's what people keep saying. It's like we've all suddenly agreed that the world is too big to change and so why bother even thinking about it. So I wanna call attention to the simple and powerful act of wanting more. I wanna be very clear, and I want you to internalize this as deeply as you can. You are allowed to want more than this without having all the answers, without understanding what that would look like exactly. It is okay. It's even beneficial for you to want more than you see all around you. More meaning in your daily interactions in your life, in your career trajectory, more integrity in all of the people and systems around you. More humane leadership, both at a macro global level and also on a day-to-day basis with your boss at work. More options for how we live, how we work, parent, how we create, more room for our families to live differently, more honesty, more humanity, more possibility in our lives. Let me say this clearly before I even start, wanting more is not an ungrateful act. It's not the opposite of being grateful. You can hold gratitude and want more and imagine something better. Even if you're grateful for what you already have, it doesn't mean that you are a negative person. It just means that you are awake and paying attention. That's it. Sometimes when we think about wanting more or we notice that we want more, it's uncomfortable. A lot of us were taught when we were younger, whether it was directly or indirectly, that wanting too much was a risky thing to do, You might not get what you want, and that sometimes is painful. We were taught to be realistic. We were taught to be grateful. We were taught to keep our expectations in check. And while gratitude matters, there is a quiet message underneath all of those things, and that is, don't ask for what doesn't exist yet. Just let that land for a second. Because wanting something new challenges the way that things are currently set up, it challenges the systems, it challenges the leadership. It challenges our traditions that we haven't questioned for a very long time. They just are, this is what life is, this is what our traditions are, full stop. So instead of exploring our own desires, we just shut them out. We learned to shrink them and ignore them, that shrinking shows up everywhere in our careers that we outgrow that are not fulfilling us, in the leadership styles that we tolerate. Our leaders that May or may not be performing as we would like them to and in our lives that technically work and look good on paper, but they don't actually fit us anymore. But instead of doing anything about it, we ignore our desires and our wants around that. We just shrink to fit whatever life we're in or whatever circumstances are around us. But when we convince ourselves that our wants and our desires are unrealistic or inappropriate or selfish, we don't just limit our own lives. We lower the ceiling for everybody around us. That means that we tolerate leadership that does not inspire us, and we accept systems that exhaust us, and we pass down patterns to our children that teach them to just adapt to what's around them instead of imagining something better and having the audacity to want that thing. This epidemic of apathy is an understandable reaction. There is a lot of overwhelming information coming at us every single day. There's a lot happening in the world. There's a lot changing that we have no control over, and it's changing very quickly. It's not even always obvious what is changing until all of a sudden, boom, it's totally different. Everybody has a different story about where everything is headed and what the future is gonna be like. It's totally understandable that in the face of all of this unknown, you might wanna just sit down and just wait it out and not try to throw your hat in the ring. Everybody's feeling a little bit burned out. Everybody's on social media comparing themselves to everybody else and finding themselves wanting, because of course, social media is very shiny and that's not what real life looks like. So we just scroll endlessly on our phones. We settle in to our jobs, to our relationships, to our lives, and we numb our desires because it seems like they'll never happen. The world seems so vast. How can one person possibly shift a broken system? Right? But that intimidation keeps us small and numb and mimicking everybody else instead of leading with our own unique wants. It is also completely untrue. Think about the guy that invented Post-It Notes. They just wanted a better bookmark it arguably has changed the entire world. What would we all do without Post-it Notes? But I don't think that wanting is the problem there. I'd like to reframe this for you. Wanting is not the problem. Silencing that wanting is the problem. While ignoring your wants leads to apathy, honoring them, fuels creation. Wanting is not selfish, it is literally the blueprint for everything meaningful that exists in this world. Without it, we create nothing new. We just copy what is. We become very good at managing what exists. Instead of imagining what could be. And over time we lose the ability to even tell the difference between the things that we chose for ourselves and the things that we just adapted to. It's easy to mistake, endurance for strength. Or compliance for character, we find safety and familiarity. And when wanting disappears, so does curiosity and when that fades, so does creativity. I'm not just talking about artistic creativity. i'm talking about the creativity that is required to solve big problems, to build better structures, to relate to one another in new ways with depth and imagination. On a personal level, this shows up as resentment, chronic fatigue, or the sense that you're living someone else's life, even when everything looks totally fine and from the outside, people would say, what are you talking about? You have everything. On a collective level it looks like stagnant leadership, recycled ideas, and a culture that just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating instead of evolving. It's like we've lost the spark. And honestly, when you look at it that way, wanting is not a threat to stability. It's what keeps everything stable because it keeps all of us, it keeps life responsive and alive and capable of change. That is what creates stability. Nothing new has ever entered this world that somebody did not want. Nothing happens until somebody admits that what exists is not enough. Every single improvement, every innovation, every cultural shift has started with somebody saying there has to be another way. And that doesn't mean that you know how to get there. identifying that there is somewhere that you wish would improve, doesn't mean you understand how it can improve or where it needs to go. Let's say you want more from your leaders, you can't tell them how to do that, but you see the way that they lead, the way that they treat people, the way that they respond to challenges, and you step back and you say, I just want there to be more humanity in all of this. Or more courage, more imagination. It doesn't mean you have a plan. It doesn't even mean that anybody is ready to act on that yet, but it does mean that you are awake and paying attention. Let's talk about what happens when you allow yourself to want what you already want inside. When you let yourself hold your desires without immediately justifying or trying to minimize them or keep them silent and not telling anybody, I think something interesting happens. Your sense of possibility expands. The things that you can imagine for yourself, for your children, for your loved ones, for the world around you get so much bigger and more exciting and more colorful. You stop asking if things are allowed or if it's too much, or if you're being unreasonable asking for whatever it is, and you start asking. What feels right to me and letting that guide your thought processes, your day to day, the way that you notice the world around you and the things that you expect from the people around you. You begin to move through the world with more confidence. You don't have all the answers, but you're trusting your own signals, and that is the first step. You've loosened the invisible cage that you've been living inside just by imagining something bigger and better. And guys, I'm not talking about big, enormous steps. I'm not talking about toppling empires. I mean tiny steps in your everyday life. Even choosing not to just accept what you're given by the doctor. Choosing not to be the person who is the strong one or the one that's managing the emotions of every room. Acknowledging that you want a different job or a different role in the job that you have, acknowledging that you want to live at the beach or you really want to buy a different car or go somewhere where you don't need a car at all. Whatever, acknowledging that you want something is the first step toward magic and these tiny changes that you make. Can eventually create a tidal wave of change in your life and for everybody around you. Think about the women's suffrage movement. A few women decided, we want the right to vote. It seems like a small thing. It turned into an enormous movement, and grew into what is the modern women's rights in every area of life. Little tiny changes can be so magical. You don't have to go through life feeling invisible, like you've disappeared in your own life. You are allowed to want things. Just the other day, my husband came home from work and declared that we were all gonna go out to dinner and we were gonna have this whatever night that he had envisioned, I was not feeling it at all. I was tired and I was, had a different plan for my evening. I wanted to work on some of the writing that I've been doing, and I wanted to read my book because I was at the end of it. And normally what would step forward for me for even wanting that? Because what I'm saying is I don't want to go spend that time with my family would be guilt. I would feel guilty. I should be spending time with my kids. They were at school all day. I didn't see them. My husband was at work, I didn't see him. I should want to be with them, but if I'm being honest, I wanna just crawl in the bathtub and read my book. so I said it. You know what they said? They said, okay, we'll see you when we get back. And then when they got back, they were so excited to tell me all about what they did and what they talked about and what was funny. And I don't know who farted in the car. I have sons I got what I needed. I needed that time to rest and recharge and give myself what I wanted. It's a very small example, but it was one of my favorite evenings I've had in a long time. So what I'm saying is you deserve the right to want what you want and to acknowledge those things and say them out loud and see what happens. It reminds us that we are not just here to maintain what already exists, but we're here to participate active participants in what comes next. How can we build something bigger, something better for the future, for our future, and for the future of all the people that we love? This is not just a personal thing. This isn't something that just exists inside of one person or that you can just hold inside of yourself and not share. This has to be a collective effort. It's not just about fulfilling one person's wants, When people allow themselves to want more. The entire system can evolve and everybody doesn't want the same thing. That much is very clear We all have a different idea of what better looks like, but offering that out to the world, sharing that beginning to collaborate, moves the systems forward. We get better leadership because somebody wanted leadership that was more human. We get better work structures because somebody wanted work that doesn't burn people out. Imagine that. We get better futures because somebody refused to accept the limits that they were born into. Wanting new things is exactly how the world improves. These aren't quick fixes. None of this is perfect. There are plenty of changes that have happened that are not in a good direction, but consistently things are changing. It's so important that we all participate in that change. I wanna leave you with this today. It's just an invitation. I'm not trying to give you homework or put pressure on you. The first step is acknowledging that we all want something. Where do you feel yourself wanting something that you haven't said out loud? Where have you been talking yourself out of wanting whatever it is because it feels unrealistic, or inconvenient or dangerous to want that? What would change if you trusted yourself and trusted that desire? And allowed yourself to go down that path of wanting instead of dismissing it. What would change? What might change? What definitely would, what could happen? We don't need a plan. None of this is action yet. You don't need any permission to hear your own desires and wants. It doesn't make you ungrateful. It's not selfish. It's not complaining, You're just acknowledging that you want something better. If this episode resonates, this is the work that we do at a life in color, encouraging people to trust themselves, reclaim their inner authority, and imagine lies that actually fit who they are. As always, my email is Laura, L-A-U-R-A at a life in color.co. I hope you'll send me your answers to the questions that I ask, and any thoughts that you have on this or any of our episodes. Thank you so much for staying with us and joining us this week, and I hope that you will continue to show up as we do future episodes of a life and color the podcast. I hope you all have the best week and I will talk to you soon. Bye now. Bye.