Know Yourself

Last year, I interviewed for a job on a magazine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up working for myself, but it was a rare opening, so I thought I should at least apply. I spent two days, and more money than I care to mention, looking for the perfect interview dress. I got my hair cut and my nails done. I bought a new bag, new scent, new shoes. But in all this frantic consumption, I neglected to do one thing. I didn’t give any real thought to what they might ask me, or what I might say in response.

At the interview, I struggled to organise my thoughts, or offer a cogent reason why I should get the job. I watched the polite interest cool on their faces, at counterpoint to a nagging voice at the back of my mind: What about your book? If you get this job, you’ll never do it.

My book... conceived four years ago. 
I was convinced if I could just find the time, I’d get it done. But now here I was, trying to get hired again, offering to 
sequester eight hours a day, five days a week, to do someone else’s work.

I didn’t get the job, in case you’re 
wondering. Later, I realised that turning up to the interview with a nice bag, and no prior preparation, had been an act of self-sabotage. I had been wavering 
between what I wanted, and what I thought I should want. It should be easy to distinguish between the two. It isn’t.

Which is how I come to be booked in for a Skype session with Kevin Kreitman, the world’s first certified Wantologist. 
It’s her job to help clients figure out what they’re actually after. And one year on, I still can’t decide whether I want the sec-urity and structure of a staff job, or the freedom to finish my book. “When people want to change their lives, they have this presenting problem,” says Kreitman. “It’s usually: ‘I want a better job, I want to make more money, I want to get a 
divorce, I want to relocate’. You adopt a solution, because you think the solution is going to bring you an experience.”

Kreitman was an industrial engineer. Back when she worked in industry, she noticed that companies were snapping up ‘solutions’ (mostly expensive new technology), finding they failed to incr-ease efficiency, and kept going under as a result. So she started holding workshops, asking consultants questions that were specifically designed to root out the expectations that underpinned these purchasing orders.

“You ask different questions, you elicit different understandings, and you find out that people never realised what those underlying expectations were. Sometimes, people didn’t want to share what their company was doing so I said: ‘What’s important is you 
learn how to ask these questions. Use something in your personal life you don’t mind sharing’. People would come up with personal issues and they would get these huge insights. It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me.”

She took her careful line of questioning out of the training annexe, into the consulting room, and gave it a name: Wantology. This ‘critical thinking 
method’, can be applied by anyone trying to figure out what they want in life. It takes three hour-long sessions, and at $200 an hour, it isn’t cheap, but it’s quick and once you have the tools, they’re yours to take away. She says the method has more in common with learning to drive than lying on an analyst’s couch.

“Wantology is more like life coaching. It’s about how to improve your choices. It’s about learning how to unpack and track what it is you said you wanted. It’s good for anyone who’s stuck. Anyone who’s embarking on a path they’re ambivalent about, or has been struggling with a goal a long time.”

I started our conversation thinking I probably wasn’t the ideal candidate for Wantology (I spent my teens snivelling at various therapists; I’m already quite good at unpacking my motives). But that does very sound familiar.

Our session starts with an ‘initial statement of want’. I have to pare down what I want into a single sentence. I dither for a bit, then settle on: “I want to write my book”. We then we spend the next hour unloading the freight of expectation from this simple statement. “What do you think will happen when you write it?” Kreitman keeps saying. “What changes will it actually make to your life?”

We zip through orientation; a set of three scales that tell you whether you’re hamstrung by external expec-tation or inner experience, and if you’re ‘floating’ or ‘navigating’ towards your goal (I’m ‘floating’, by the way, which doesn’t come as a huge surprise). We talk about other ways to write, and new platforms for ideas. The process feels forward-looking, practical, and invol-ves a lot of diagrams. At no point do I feel like bursting into tears.

We end the session. I feel pretty upbeat, though I haven’t experienced any seismic ‘a-ha moment’ myself. As far as I can see, the first hour is about knowing yourself. Given my tendency towards gloomy introspection, and the fact my job requires a certain level of honesty as a prerequisite to being any good, I feel I sort-of do already. But while I think of my qualities as entrenched, Kreitman has a different take. She believes the human brain can change, and with training, we can effect that change ourselves.

It’s tempting to chalk Wantology down as a First World solution, to assu-me that our vision has become so occlu-ded by status anxiety or societal expectation that we’ve lost sight of what really makes us happy. In fact, Arlie 
Russell Hochschild already did. In The Outsourced Self, she argues persuasively that the existence of Wantology is a symptom of our addiction to market services, our tendency to now farm out duties to paid professionals that were once the remit of friends and family.

But it’s worth remembering that 
cautionary tales about getting want you want are as old as want itself. Think of the Chinese curse, “May you find what you are looking for”. Or the occi-dental fables about three wishes (clue: they always seem to end up wasted). Presumably, the mutability of desire predates market forces. And as Kreitman points out, friends and family are wonderful, but they aren’t always 
objective. They know us, they love us, and they’re invested in us. They’re not interested in shaking up the status quo. If we’re looking for a shift in perspective, they’re not the ones to ask.

Until my second session, I’m reserving judgement on the methodology itself, but I will say this: it’s always helpful to talk to someone informed and objective, who still gets you. Sometimes you need to articulate ideas that have been gestating, half-formed, in your head. But in the course of ordinary life, it’s unacceptable to sit there and talk about yourself for an hour at a time. Perhaps this is the point Hochschild missed: we outsource these conversations because if we made our friends sit through them, we’d soon be running low on friends.

Before we say goodbye, Kreitman says: “You know, when you talk about your book, your face lights up. I see real passion there.” It’s a small moment; she mentions it almost in passing. But right now, it’s exactly what I want to hear.

(To find out more, go to www.want-ology.com)