The Desire Map

The Desire Map gives your goal-setting mechanism a makeover by showing you that desire, not facts, is what fuels our lives and helps you rely on your feelings to navigate life, instead of giving in to the pressure of the outside world to check the boxes on goals that don’t really matter to you.

Danielle says desire is the driving force behind life. Chances are, when you hear the word desire, the first thing you think about is our animalistic sex drive, but desire goes way beyond that. Apart from getting you out of bed in the morning, because you crave human connection, food, love and achievement, and forcing you to tackle your fears, desire also makes you more creative.

That’s because when you want something it forces you to get creative and work out how you’re going to get that thing that you want.

For example, if you remember your first crush in high school, I bet you’ve obsessed day and night about how you can make them notice you. Sending paper notes, dropping hints, and, in my case, blatant staring are all creative attempts at firing that first spark that might lead you to your first love.

So when you use desire as your foundation for setting goals, you’re preparing yourself well for the creative effort you’re gonna have to make to get there.

We usually try to make decisions based on facts, not feelings. We think basing our choices on what’s true for everyone, we end up with better results, but in most cases, that’s not true. Actually, choosing to ignore our feelings is sort of a way of ignoring truth.

Why?

Because feelings are just as true as facts – they’re just not true for everybody. When you say that Fred is super annoying, what you’ve really just said is that Fred makes you feel really annoyed – and that’s as true as it gets.

That’s what makes ignoring feelings so hard, and also wrong. However, it’s the reason businesses don’t tell their employees to follow their heart or passion – because strong feelings can easily become distracting and hard to deal with, like the sadness over a relationship ending.

But no matter what your boss tells you, you should never ignore what your “core desired feelings” tell you, as Danielle calls them. These are the major feelings you crave to feel in your life and they’re often the guiding stars that’ll help you make big life decisions.

Danielle used to set goals like a lot of driven people do nowadays. “I’m going to make $100,000 this year.” or “I’ll publish my book by October 15th next year.” But those hard numbers only sapped her energy…