L.Ed.18 - Is This Still What You Want?
The Business and Leadership Coaching Company
July 2026 I Series: Life Designer I Edition: 18 I Theme: Strategy
Read Time: 7 Minutes
Somewhere in the middle of an ordinary week, the question arrives uninvited: is this still what you want?
It rarely arrives during a crisis. It tends to arrive in the ordinary moments, driving home from work you are competent at, sitting at a dinner you have had a version of a hundred times before, scrolling past a photo of someone else's life that looks, from the outside, like the one you thought you were building and should be living. A quiet, unspectacular question: is this still what you want, or is it simply what you are still doing, because stopping to ask felt like a risk you could not afford this year either.
The life you have was built, mostly, through a long sequence of reasonable decisions made under real pressure: the job that paid well enough to take, the responsibilities that arrived faster than you chose them, the people who needed you to keep showing up a certain way. None of those decisions were wrong, exactly, in the moment they were made. But a life assembled from a decade of reasonable decisions is not the same thing as a life that was deliberately designed, and the difference is what this question is pointing at.
This is the quiet shape of burnout that does not look like burnout from the outside. You are still functioning, still showing up, still carrying the load for the people who depend on you. Sleep does not quite fix the tiredness anymore, though, because the tiredness was never really about hours. It is about the gap between the life you are living and the life some earlier version of you was actually hoping for, a gap that widens quietly when nobody is checking on it.
You may not be able to say, immediately, what you would want instead, and that uncertainty is not a failure either. It is simply what happens when a life has been accepted or survived rather than chosen for long enough, the muscle for actually wanting things, specifically and out loud, atrophies from disuse. The first honest answer to is this still what you want is often I am not entirely sure anymore, and that answer is a perfectly good place to begin.
The Fixer Trap shows up in this question too, quietly. You have spent years tending to everyone else' s wants, the children, the partner, the ageing parent, the friend who calls when things are hard, and somewhere in all that tending, your own wanting got set down and never quite picked back up. Fixing everyone else became, without you fully deciding it, a way of being valuable that left very little room or energy for asking what you actually wants for yourself.
There is a particular kind of grief that surfaces here, small and easy to dismiss, for the version of the life you once imagined that is not the one currently in front of you. It is worth letting that grief be real rather than talking yourself out of it, because underneath it, usually, is information: about what mattered to you once, what you quietly set aside, and what might still be recoverable if you were honest enough to name it. Grief, looked at honestly rather than avoided, tends to be a far better guide than the busyness that usually drowns it out.
This is not, despite how it can feel in the moment, a midlife indictment. Asking whether this is still what you want does not mean the last decade was wasted, or that the people in your life were the wrong choice, or that everything needs to be dismantled to be fixed. It means the life that was built under pressure deserves, periodically, an honest review against what you actually value now, rather than running indefinitely on the assumptions that built it.
The Inner Chamber matters here precisely because this is not a question most people ask out loud, to anyone, including themselves, in any substantial and sustained way. There is rarely a safe space built for it, the version of yourself everyone else relies on does not have room to sit with not knowing what you want, and so the question gets pushed back down, again, until the next ordinary moment when it surfaces uninvited once more.
The honest version of this work does not start with a five-year plan, that may come later, if at all. It starts with simply naming what theme words keep recurring when you are honest with yourself: freedom, connection, rest, meaning, whatever they are, and letting those words, rather than the next obligation on the calendar, start to shape what comes next.
Is this still what you want is not a question with a wrong answer. Yes is a perfectly good answer, if it is actually true and not simply the answer that requires nothing further of you. Not entirely is also a good answer, the start of one, because it means there is a life still worth designing on purpose, rather than one that simply continues to happen to you.
Whatever the honest answer turns out to be this week, the question itself was worth letting land properly, rather than letting the next obligation crowd it out before you had a chance to actually sit with what it was asking you.
It can help to make the question smaller before trying to answer it fully. Not what do I want from the rest of my life, which is large enough to avoid entirely, but what does a genuinely good ordinary Tuesday actually look like, in concrete, sensory detail. Who is in it, what does the morning feel like, what are you doing that you would choose again even on a day nobody was watching. The answer to the small question often reveals more than the large one ever does. It is also, usefully, an answer you can start testing this week rather than someday.
It is also worth noticing what you protect time for without being asked to, the activity nobody has to remind you about, that you return to even when the week is full. Whatever that is, however small or apparently unimportant it seems against everything else competing for your attention, is usually a more honest signal of what you actually want than anything you would say out loud in a room full of people you is trying not to disappoint.
None of this requires a dramatic life change announced to everyone at once. Most genuine redesign happens quietly, in small decisions repeated over months, a Tuesday evening reclaimed here, a commitment declined there, each one small enough not to alarm anyone, all of them adding up, eventually, to a life that resembles an actual choice rather than an accumulation of other people' s expectations.
The question is this still what you want is not asking you to blow up the life you have built. It is asking you to start checking, periodically and honestly, whether the life still matches the person making the decisions inside it, because the two have a way of quietly drifting apart when nobody is paying attention, and the only real defence against that drift is asking the question often enough that the answer stays current.
If an honest answer this week is no, not entirely, that does not require an immediate, dramatic response. It requires acknowledging the answer rather than burying it again, and letting that acknowledgement be the quiet, private starting point for a slower, more deliberate redesign, one Tuesday at a time, rather than a single decision you are not yet ready to make. Acknowledging it honestly, even silently, is already a different choice than the one you have been making by default for years.
The question will come back, uninvited, again, probably sooner than you expect. The work is not answering it once and filing it away. The work is being willing to actually sit with it, honestly, each time it returns, and to let the answer, when it changes, change something about how the next week is actually lived. That willingness, repeated often enough, is most of what designing a life on purpose actually looks like in practice.
If that question landed somewhere honest while you were reading this, it deserves more than a passing thought before the week sweeps it away again.
If you would like to think it through in a receptive and non-judgemental space with someone who will listen carefully and reflect back what they hear, a Discovery Call is a confidential 30-minute conversation about where you are, what is in the way, what you could and would want to do about it, and how coaching can support you in moving from uncertainty to clarity to aligned action.
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If a Discovery Call feels like a bigger step than you are currently ready for, perhaps the Find Your Focus: The Life Design Compass is an easier place to begin. It asks some honest questions that help you take stock of where your life actually is, whether it brings you the fulfilment you expected and want, and what you have quietly set aside along the way. It is the first step in the same direction: introspection now, a conversation, insight, clarity and aligned action when you are ready.
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The BLCC works with people at all levels and phases of life who are looking to create a life that meets and exceeds their expectations. We sit with you to make sense of how you arrived where you are, define what Ultimate Happiness actually looks like for you, and clear the quiet blockages keeping it from being your lived reality. If you are carrying questions about why you are feeling unfulfilled now, what is missing, or what a life lived more deliberately could actually look like for you, we would welcome a conversation.
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