What Do You Actually Want?

She can run the team. Close the deal. Hold everything together. And cannot remember the last time she made a decision based purely on what she wanted.

In this episode burnout and identity coach Shaina Jones Magrone explores the question that sits underneath all of it: what do you actually want? Not the responsible answer. The real one.

She breaks down why high-achieving women stop asking themselves this question, what happens when the wants go underground, and why no productivity system, promotion, or vacation can touch the thing that's actually missing.

This episode won't give you the answer. It will help you find it.

Work With Me

If this episode gave you language for something you’ve been noticing in your work or your life and you’re still sorting through what to do with it, you don’t have to figure that out on your own.

I offer Alignment Calls for women who are beginning to see things more clearly but aren’t interested in rushing into decisions or making dramatic changes.

These conversations are a space to think through what’s actually going on, what you’re continuing to choose, and what a more aligned next step could look like for you.

If that’s something you want support with, you can book a call through the link in the show notes.

https://calendly.com/shainajonescoaching/alignment-call 

Website: https://www.shainajonescoaching.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

What if burnout isn't the problem? But the signal that the way you've been succeeding no longer fits. Welcome to the Era of Alignment. I'm Shayna Jones McGrohn, and this podcast is for high-achieving women who look successful on paper but feel exhausted, overwhelmed, or quietly disconnected from the lives they've built. If you've tried rest, boundaries, time off, or pushing through, and nothing actually changed, this space is for you. Here, we don't treat burnout as weakness, we treat it as information. Each episode will name what's really happening beneath burnout, why the old models of success stop working for capable women, and what alignment requires when you're no longer willing to override yourself. Because burnout is the signal and alignment is the shift. So last time we talked, I introduced you to the five burnout archetypes, five distinct patterns that I've identified in my work that are proprietary to the Xhale framework, my framework. And I told you that one of them, one of those archetypes is yours, or maybe a combination of them. And that when you find the right one, it won't feel like information. Instead, it'll feel like relief. Well, this week I want to ask you a question that naturally follows from that. Now that you're starting to see the pattern, what do you actually want? Not what are you working toward or what makes sense or what would make everyone else breathe a little easier, but what do you want? I'm gonna give you a moment to think about that before I say anything else. I ask this question to every woman I work with at some point, and the responses tell me everything. Now, some women produce a list immediately. It's a very organized, very responsible, strategic list of goals and milestones and things to accomplish. And I find this to be very interesting because I've asked her what she wants, not what she's working toward. And those two things are not the same. Other women, however, go quiet. And the quiet that they go into is this kind of blankness almost. And it's deeply unfamiliar to a woman who always knows what to do next. And honestly, for some, it can feel terrifying. But both responses tell me the same thing. They tell me that somewhere in the building and achieving and the carrying and performing, that the wanting got buried. Not because it disappeared, but because it stopped feeling safe or relevant or earned or appropriate given everything else that needed attention. So the wants went underground and the woman kept moving. And the distance between who she was becoming and what she actually wanted kept growing. That is until the burnout made it impossible to ignore. Here's why I start here with the wanting before we talk about strategy or next steps or what the path forward looks like. And that's because you can't build a life that fits if you don't know what you're building toward. And it has to be done and felt at the actual level of self. I work with women who run million-dollar businesses, who manage teams and navigate boards and hold families together, and still show up looking like they have it all figured out. But when I ask them what they want, what they actually personally, privately want, the room goes quiet. And that silence isn't emptiness. It's years of deferred answers, wants that were set aside because the timing wasn't right, because other people's needs came first, because wanting something for yourself felt selfish given everything else on the plate. But here's what I've also found out. Those deferred wants don't disappear, they accumulate. They become the weight underneath the burnout, the thing that rest doesn't fix and productivity systems can't touch. Because this was never a productivity problem. I want to talk about what it costs to leave that question unanswered, in a real practical sense. When you don't know what you want, you can't make decisions that are truly yours. You make decisions based on what's logical, what's responsible, what other people expect, what the evidence points to. And those decisions might be good decisions, even excellent ones, reasonable decisions, certainly, and successful decisions even. But they're not necessarily yours. And over time, the accumulation of decisions that aren't truly yours is what creates misalignment. The life that fits on paper but feels wrong in your bones. The woman who can't answer what do you want isn't broken. She's been so focused on doing the right thing for so long that she's lost the thread back to herself. And finding that thread, that's the work. That's not my job, and I bet that's not even what you're looking for. But what I will tell you is that the answer to what you want exists. It's not gone. It's underneath the noise of everything that's been demanding your attention. You know, you already know. It's underneath the responsible version and the strategic version and the version that makes sense given your circumstances. But your actual wants are still there. And there's a version of your life where you know what they are and you're moving toward them. Not recklessly, not by burning everything down, but deliberately, with clarity, with joy, with a path that was built around who you actually are, not who you've been performing. That's what alignment looks like. And that's what we build in this work. So here's what I want you to do before we talk next time. Sit with this question, not to answer it perfectly or to produce a strategy, but just to notice what comes up when you actually ask yourself, what do I want? Notice what feels exciting. Notice what feels scary. Notice what you immediately dismiss as unrealistic or irresponsible or too much. Those dismissals are usually pointing directly at the answer. If something stirs when you sit with it, that stirring is a signal. Now the alignment call is in the show notes. It's a 45-minute conversation where we go into that question together with your specific life, your specific pattern, your specific wants, and start to build a structure of what the path forward actually looks like for you. It's clarity. And we sit in that clarity because clarity is what changes things. I'm Shana Jones McGrone. This is the era of alignment. I'll see you next time. Keep going.