Let Desire Lead

🎧🎧 Listen to Sunday Sunshine HERE 🎧🎧

January brings pressure.

Pressure to set the goals.
Pressure to launch them and do better than last year.
Pressure to declare them publicly—and stick to them.

If you’re not crystal clear yet, it can feel like you’re already behind. And, even if you are clear, that behind feeling persists.

[I saw the most amazing vision board this week! Eeek. Mine is not complete.]

I believe the goal-getting process is widely misunderstood.

We’ve been taught that progress comes from picking the right goal ... quickly.
From narrowing.
From deciding.
From committing early.

But that’s not where breakthroughs break through.

We can all do the impossible.
But the impossible doesn’t come from conventional thinking.
It comes from desire—and the willingness to think beyond what’s familiar.

Most of us generate a few ideas…
Look at them…
Settle on one…
And call it clarity.

That’s not clarity.
That’s default.

There’s actually research behind this.

Creativity research calls it the Quantity–Quality Effect:
the more ideas you generate, the higher the likelihood that a truly novel, high-quality idea will emerge.

The first ideas are almost always your safest ones.
The familiar ones.
The ones shaped by what’s already been done.

Only after the mind says:
​“I’ve tried everything I know”​
…does imagination truly engage.

I saw this play out firsthand when I led a sales and marketing organization at Fast Company—a brand built to celebrate breakthrough ideas and innovative thinking.

Ironically, I left many brainstorms feeling frustrated.

We’d throw ideas up on the whiteboard.
The naysayers would chime in.
The safest option would survive.

Meanwhile, our clients wanted exclusive, never-before-done ideas.
New experiences.
Original partnerships.

But more often than not, the media innovation brand delivered polished versions of past ideas.

Nothing novel.
Nothing bold.
Nothing that required imagination around truly novel possibilities.

That’s the status quo at work.

And the status quo—inside organizations and inside our own lives—is quietly corrosive.

Doing more of the same is settling for less every time.

But when I got the right people in the room—
When every idea made it on the whiteboard—
When no one edited themselves too early—

Something shifted.

Breakthrough thinking doesn’t come from better thinking alone.
It comes from thinking longer—until the obvious runs out.

Consider that the January pressure pushes us to act before we’ve thought enough.

We confuse urgency with clarity.
Movement with progress.
A chosen goal with the right goal.

So we repeat patterns. Hit the same ceilings.
And wonder why our goals don’t inspire us.

If January feels heavy, rushed, or constricting—
You’re not broken.
You’re not behind.

You may simply be stopping too soon.

Before you lock in your goals this year, try this instead:

• Generate more ideas than feels reasonable.

• Stay in the question longer than feels comfortable. The simple act of slowing down opens doors to new possibilities.

• Let desire—not convention—lead.

And when the ugly thought of 'But how?' creeps in, it's a dream killer. Ask a better question.

• Who has done this before?

• Who can help me see what I can't see?

• Who can help reimagine possibilities?

• Who knows someone who knows someone?

The impossible doesn’t live in the first idea.
It lives beyond the ones most people never bother to explore.

Clarity isn’t about choosing faster.
It’s about creating enough space for imagination to show up.

That’s when everything changes.

As you head into the week, take a breath before you decide.

You don’t need the perfect goal yet.
You don’t need the clean answer.
You don’t need to have it all figured out.

What you need is permission to think longer. AND, Get a thinking partner!

To let more ideas surface.
To let desire speak before discipline takes over.
To stay with the question just a little longer than feels efficient.

Believing you don’t have time because you’re already behind is the quiet lie that keeps you from everything you say you want.

Because clarity doesn’t come from rushing.
It comes from giving imagination enough room to do its work.

Wishing you a week of spacious thinking, unexpected ideas, and the courage to stay curious a little longer.

📓Journal Prompts for the Week Ahead To Help You Think Longer

• Where am I rushing to decide simply because I feel behind?

• What are the first “reasonable” goals or ideas I’ve already settled on—and what assumptions am I making by choosing them?

• If I let myself generate twenty more possibilities without judging them, what themes or desires start to reveal themselves?

• What do I want this next chapter to feel like—not just achieve—and how different would my goals be if that feeling mattered as much as the outcome?