What do you want?
In his book, The Coaching Habit, author Michael Bungay Stanier poses six crucial questions that form the basics of coaching others. They are also crucial questions to ask yourself in navigating our relationships with others and with ourselves.
Of these 6 questions, the foundational question is both simple and complex:
What do you want?
Stanier suggests that even if we know what we want on the surface, the follow-up question usually stumps people:
What do you really want?
Here’s an example:
When I ask my clients what they want, they often tell me things like “more money” or “more time.” These are common surface-level answers.
When I ask them what they really want, they often can’t answer.
Instead, they obfuscate. Whatever it is that they think they really want, they believe it will only happen with more money and/or more time. They can’t see past the surface.
It’s an important question to consider.
Why are you doing what you do? What is motivating your actions? What do you really want? It’s rarely the obvious result on the surface.
Today, the sun makes a conjunction with the moon’s North Node, bringing this question into more focus.
The nodes of the moon are significant in astrology, although they are not actual planets in the sky. They are points on the moon’s orbit. When a new moon or full moon happens at one of the nodal points, eclipses happen.
The ancient astrologers viewed the north and south nodes as the head and tail of a dragon. The north node symbolizes what we are hungry for, what we desire, the need that we struggle to satisfy.
The south node represents what we need to release.
The nodes sit exactly opposite each other on the zodiacal wheel and change signs approximately every 18 months.
The north node is currently at 4º of Taurus, close to where last week’s new moon solar eclipse in Aries occurred.
Eclipses are portals of big change: they tend to signify big endings and beginnings for changes that will happen over a longer arc of time.
(In full transparency: I don’t yet understand how we had an eclipse when the sun and moon were 4º from the North node; I haven’t reached that level in my astrology studies yet. If you know, please post it in the comments.)
The conjunction of the sun to the north node is a call-back to last week’s eclipse. It invites us to consider Stainer’s foundational question before we move forward into this next chapter:
What do you really want?
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