what do you actually want? (vision)
The first of five Wednesdays with the movements of alignment
I ask a question early in most coaching conversations, and I have learned to leave a long silence after it. What do you want? Not what you should do, and not what is realistic given the mortgage, the calendar, and the people who count on you. What do you want? Some people answer with a plan. Some answer with a list of things they would like to stop doing. And a fair number sit with it for a while and tell me, honestly, that they do not know. I have come to think of that last answer as the most useful of the three, because at least it is true, and because it usually means the question has not been asked in a very long time.
Over the next five Wednesdays, I would like to spend some time with the five movements of the process described in A Life Aligned. Vision, Commitment, Awareness, Living Into, Integration. Not as instruction. More as inquiry, one movement at a time. Each week I will offer five statements to sit with and one small practice, and you are welcome to read them and do nothing at all. That is a legitimate way to receive this. We begin where the process begins: with what you want.
Vision comes first for a reason that is more structural than inspirational. Commitment needs something to be committed to. Awareness without direction is only noticing. You can take a hundred careful steps and still be walking a circle. When someone tells me they feel stuck despite doing all the right things, I have usually found that the difficulty sits somewhere upstream of the doing.
Vision is well-resourced when you can feel the pull of something before you can justify it. Not clarity, not a five-year plan, not knowing how. In the book, I call this a ping, the aliveness in the body when something is true for you, as distinct from the thud that tells you something is not. A ping arrives without instructions. It comes before the reasoning, and the reasoning tends to show up later to argue with it.
When this movement thins, life narrows to maintenance. The days get managed rather than chosen, and the question of what you actually want has gone unasked long enough that it begins to feel unanswerable. Wanting is a capacity, and capacities stiffen when they go unused. In my early twenties, I wanted to move to Manhattan, wait tables, and try acting. I subscribed to Backstage, read the casting calls, and imagined answering them. I never did. Part of that was fear of my family’s disapproval, and part of it was that the wanting itself seemed foolish next to the sensible life I was being handed. It took me a long time to understand that the longing had been a messenger rather than a distraction, pointing me toward a wider sense of what was possible.
So, before anything else, a small experiment. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it asks nothing of you beyond honesty.
Sit somewhere unhurried and finish this sentence five times, without editing: If nothing had to be practical, I would …
Let the first three be embarrassing. Somewhere around the fourth, something real usually arrives. You are not making a plan here. You are checking to see whether the capacity is still available to you.
Here are five statements to sit with. Read each one and notice the number that arrives first, from 1 (rarely true right now) to 5 (consistently true). Do not deliberate. The first answer is usually the honest one, and the second is usually the one you would prefer.
I can describe what I want the next season of my life to feel like, even without knowing the details.
When I picture my future, the images feel like mine rather than borrowed.
I let myself want things before I know how to get them.
There is something in my life right now that pings, however faintly.
I make room for imagination and play, not only for planning.
Whatever numbers arrive, they describe a location rather than a character. A low one often means you have been carrying something heavy for a long while, and there has been no room to ask.
Vision is explored at length in Chapter 5 of A Life Aligned, including what to do when the wanting returns and brings grief along, which happens more often than the inspirational version of this work tends to admit.
So I will leave you with the question the movement asks, and let it stay open. What do you want, before you know how? There is no hurry in it. The rainy season here runs through September, and the mornings are long.
— Mark
Next Wednesday: Commitment, and why returning matters more than never drifting.
The Alignment Inventory draws on the five-point process in A Life Aligned: The Journey to Allowing the Magic in Your Life, the first book in a trilogy on the inner work of transition, available in paperback, eBook (Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others), and audiobook at drmarkarcuri.com/a-life-aligned.
The second, Paradise (re)Discovered, arrives Fall 2026.
Mark A. Arcuri, PhD, is an integrative coach, educator, and author writing from El Refugio, Querétaro, México, where his work explores alignment, belonging, and the inner life of transition.
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