Focus on What You Want

Most people spend more time planning their holidays than planning their lives. Two weeks away gets researched, compared, and mapped out in detail. The rest of life just happens by default.

That’s not laziness. It’s the result of never having been taught a simple but critical skill: knowing how to identify what you actually want, and how to frame it in a way your brain can work with.

This article is about that skill. It’s called focusing on what you want, and it sounds obvious until you realise how consistently and unconsciously most people do the opposite.

The taxi driver problem

Imagine you’re sitting in the back of a taxi. The driver turns around and asks, where to?

And all you can tell him is where you don’t want to go.

Not the airport. Definitely not the train station. Nowhere near that restaurant on the high street. Avoid the shopping district.

How long before you arrive somewhere useful? Never. Because telling someone where you don’t want to go doesn’t get you anywhere. It just keeps you driving in circles, burning fuel, wondering why you’re not making progress.

That’s what most people do with their goals. They focus entirely on what they don’t want, then wonder why they never arrive anywhere.

Positive wants versus negative wants

There’s a fundamental difference between a positive want and a negative want, and it matters more than most people realise.

A positive want is something you’re moving toward. I want to run a marathon. I want to build a business. I want to improve my relationship.

A negative want is something you’re running away from. I don’t want to be overweight anymore. I don’t want to be stuck in this job. I don’t want to feel this way.

Both feel like motivation. But they’re fundamentally different in direction, and direction is everything.

Brian Tracy put it clearly: the key to success is to focus your conscious mind on things you desire, not things you fear. Stephen Covey called it beginning with the end in mind. Both were describing the same principle. When you know where you’re going, your energy has somewhere to go. When you only know what you’re running from, it doesn’t.

What happens in the consulting room

After well over thirty years in clinical practice, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern. The majority of people who come to see me feeling stuck in some aspect of their life don’t have a clear positive goal they’re moving toward. They’re focused on what they don’t want. Their problems. Their fears. Their worst-case scenarios.

And it makes everything worse. Not just psychologically, but practically. Because a mind focused on problems is a mind looking for more problems. It’s not looking for solutions, opportunities, or paths forward. It’s scanning for threats.

Baumeister’s research on negativity bias confirms what I see every day. Negative experiences carry roughly twice the psychological weight of positive ones. Your brain is wired to prioritise threats. When your internal focus is negative, you’re swimming with that current rather than against it.

Seligman’s work on learned optimism shows the other side. People who habitually frame their experience in forward-looking, positive terms consistently show better motivation, stronger resilience, and better outcomes. It’s not about being unrealistically positive. It’s about pointing your mental energy in a direction that actually gets you somewhere.

What your brain does with a positive goal

When your goal is clearly positive and focused on what you want, something shifts. Once something matters to you, you start seeing it everywhere — decide you want a particular car and suddenly that car is on every street. Psychologists call it selective attention. Your goal doesn’t change the world; it changes what you notice in it.

Focus on problems and you’ll see more problems. Focus on what you want and you start noticing opportunities, solutions, and paths forward that were always there but invisible because you were looking in the wrong direction.

Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory explains the mechanism. Positive emotions literally broaden your awareness and open up novel, exploratory thinking. Negative emotions do the opposite. They narrow your focus to immediate threats. When you’re focused on what you don’t want, your world shrinks. When you’re focused on what you do want, it expands.

How to reframe a negative want

The good news is that reframing is a skill, and it’s a simple one once you develop the habit.

When you notice a goal framed as something you’re running away from, apply this three-step process.

First, name the negative want clearly. I don’t want to be overweight. I don’t want to be stuck in this job. Get it out of your head and written down.

Second, ask yourself: what do I actually want instead? Not the absence of the problem, but the positive destination. Fit and healthy. A career that challenges me. Work that feels meaningful.

Third, check that the reframe is genuinely positive and specific enough to be a direction, not just a softer version of the same negative. I want to feel better is still vague. I want to run 5k three times a week gives your brain somewhere to go.

Do this with every goal before you build it. It takes two minutes and it changes the entire direction of your effort.

The two wolves

There’s an old story that illustrates this perfectly.

An old man tells his grandson that a fight is going on inside him between two wolves. One is fed by anger, fear, regret, and shame. The other is fed by hope, purpose, kindness, and faith. The same fight, he says, is going on inside every person.

The grandson asks which wolf wins.

The old man replies: the one you feed.

That’s the whole idea. What you focus on is what grows, both internally and in the world around you. Effective goal setting focuses your mind in a positive direction. And that’s a fundamentally better place to operate from than the alternative.

Your first step

Look at the goals you’re currently working toward, or thinking about. All of them.

Ask yourself honestly: are these goals focused on what I want, or what I don’t want?

If they’re negative, reframe them using the three steps above. Turn them around. Make them about moving toward something rather than away from something.

Then notice what changes. Not just in how you feel, but in what you start to see.

In the next article, we’re going to look at a tool for examining your goals from four different angles before you commit to them, including the angles that make you uncomfortable.

Further reading

1. Tracy, B. (2003). Goals! How to Get Everything You Want Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible. Berrett-Koehler.
2. Covey, S.R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
3. Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C. & Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370.
4. Seligman, M.E.P. (1990). Learned Optimism. Alfred A. Knopf.
5. Fredrickson, B.L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.