I work almost every day with people who say they don’t know what they’d love to do, but I’ve found this not to be true. I say to them, “In your heart you know exactly what you’d love to do, but the fears and guilt in your head stop you from acknowledging it.”

I then break it down so they can approach what they’d love without the fears paralyzing their vision. I start with the most obvious questions:

“Would you love to eat quality food?”

“Of course.”

“Great, write that down. What else is ridiculously easy to say you’d love to do?”

“Well, I’d love to travel.”

I build on what they know they’d love and let it unfold: “Would you love to be wealthy? How wealthy? Where and when would you love to travel? Would you love to make a difference in the world? Okay, in what way? Would you love to write, paint, speak, build, or teach? What inspires you most? Would you love to work with people? When we pull all those criteria together, what are the possibilities?” You may not know the details consciously, but inside your soul, it’s all perfectly clear and just waiting for you to call on it. So start with what you do know and build.

I worked with a gentleman in France who stated categorically, “I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life.”

I told him, “Well, I have absolute certainty that you do, and if you don’t determine the direction of your life, someone else will, so I’m going to decide for you right now. You’ll be a chimney sweep.”

“No, that’s certainly not it.”

“Great, we’ve ruled out one of 42,000 possibilities. Let’s keep going. I want you to work as a prostitute in the poorest quarter of Paris.”

“Of course not!”

“Then you’ll sell packets of chewing gum in Mexico.”

“No.”

“Hairstylist and toupee salesman to bald men?”

“No, no, no!”

“All right, if you know what it isn’t, then you obviously know something about what it is. What is it? If you knew you could fulfill it, what would it be?” I took him from the ridiculous to the sublime, and out it came. He had a great dream in his heart, but he was afraid it was too big for him. The only thing stopping him from expressing it was his fear…and you may be the same. If you knew you could fulfill it, if your fairy godmother could wave her wand and guarantee its fulfillment, what would you most love to do with your life?

The truth is that you know what you’d love to do, but you may not know how to do it. You might be banging your head against the wall trying to do it, or avoiding it until you eventually say, “I really wouldn’t love to do it.” When people say that they wouldn’t love to do what really inspires them, it just means they haven’t figured out a strategy to do it. If you don’t know how to fulfill what you’d love in life, you’ll lie to yourself that you don’t know your purpose or wouldn’t love it, because the pains seem to outweigh the pleasures. But what if you discovered that you could receive the most fulfilling pay for doing what you’d truly love more than anything else in the world? One way to do it is by breaking your purposeful doing into manageable steps.