Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:12.204)
Welcome back to Millennial Midlife. Today’s episode is one I am itching to talk about because of the time of year and because it’s something that’s so common with so many of my clients. Even women, even people, who look incredibly successful on the outside. And it’s this, I don’t know what I want. I mean, you probably guessed that from the title, right? But I don’t know what I want. We say it casually, we say it like, it makes very logical sense. We say it like it’s almost a fact or a truth about us. But most of the time it’s not actually true. So today I wanna talk about that. It’s not just a statement we use, right? It’s kind of a way of being that we get into. I wanna unpack it a little bit. Unpack why you don’t.
why you think you don’t know what you want, and why that experience can feel so confusing, so frustrating, so disconnecting or dissociating with yourself, and why the fact that you are saying it right now is not a problem.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:00.802)
Okay, so if telling yourself that I don’t know what I want isn’t a problem, or how can we start to see it as not a problem? And one of the ways that I work with clients and do this work in my own life is really from a place of compassion and self understanding. So instead of judging myself, getting curious, right? So if I have a pattern of doing something, whatever that is, no matter how easy it might be to judge that as bad or good or wrong or right from the outside,
I try and approach it from a place of curiosity. So when we approach this from a place of curiosity, this kind of mode of being of, don’t know what I want from the outside, we start to see it as it’s just a habit my brain is in, right? It’s an action I’m taking, it’s something I’m saying. So it’s probably related to beliefs I’m having and something that’s happening in my nervous system, right? So maybe, maybe saying this is a sign that my nervous system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
Maybe it’s a sign that I’m acting in congruence with some belief I have about myself or the world around me. And in fact, then that thing isn’t the behavior, but I can then start to get curious a little bit further back, a little bit closer to the root of the problem or the root of the habit, if we’re not gonna judge it as right or wrong. And then we get curious. So let’s get into it. That’s what we’re gonna do here. Okay, so let’s start small with dinner. Have you ever had that moment when somebody asks you, what do you want for dinner? I mean, it’s something that we have to do every single day, right?
You live alone, you have to ask yourself this. And if you live with other people, you ask other people this. And you might even think this over and over again, or other people are asking you this. What do you want for dinner? And you might actually know what you want for dinner if you pause to think about it for a minute. You might even have an inkling or a craving. You might even have a preference. But if you’re in a group of friends, or even if you’re just in your family group, you say, I don’t know. What do you want? I how many of us do that?
I do it all the time, I still do it all the time. I don’t know, what do you want? For me, when I don’t feel safe, or when I’m trying to keep the peace, when I’m trying to keep the peace, when I’m trying to people please a little bit, or read the room, there’s a little bit of this disconnect inside of me. There’s like this empty space where my preference should be. There’s this like, I could ignore myself and I could make it easier for everyone else, and I will make it easier for everyone else by not having an opinion, or pretending I don’t have an opinion. Not because I don’t have one.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:27.754)
even if I didn’t have one immediately because I’ve been ignoring it for so long, but even if I didn’t have one, right? This tiny moment of abandoning myself to make it easier for everyone else around me. I feel safer to abandon it than to honor it. It’s a tiny moment. It’s these tiny little moments that we get over and over again in our life and in our days, but they’re patterns and they create beliefs within our brain and they stem from beliefs in our brain and they’re related to how safe our nervous system feels. This shows up in big.
decisions too, right? Careers, relationships, goals, the direction of your life, where we feel perhaps a little nervous or scared to admit what we might really want because it might not keep the peace. It might be awkward for ourselves or others. We’re afraid that somebody might misinterpret it. We might say, I want to be rich and famous. And somebody might think, well, that’s shallow. Like, who wants to do that?
While your actual desire for being rich and famous might be related to contributing something big to the world, but we oftentimes disconnect from ourselves because it doesn’t feel safe. It feels so much safer to read the room, to keep the peace, to keep the voice inside of us quiet, because we can actually kind of keep that quiet. We can’t control everyone else around us, but we can control how we interact with them. A lot of women say, I don’t know what I want often. And I’m not going to speak for men because I’m not a man and I don’t work with lot of men, but I don’t know what I want comes up so often.
But what we’re actually saying is, I’m not sure I feel safe naming my desire. I’m not sure that it’s okay for me to want what I want. I’m not sure it’s possible. I’m not sure it’s acceptable. I’m not sure it will keep the peace. I used to be a geologist. You probably know that. Maybe you don’t know that. I used to be a geologist. I worked in oil and gas. I had a great salary. I had really great benefits.
I worked with really amazing people. worked for an amazing company. It was really a fun job. And I had a life that looked really good on paper. It made sense on paper. And it was actually kind of fun to be in it too. Like I don’t want to, I don’t want to downplay this. There were fun technical problems. I worked with amazing people. We had a lot of fun in the work that we did. And then the play that we did around work. But on the inside, my good on life paper, in my good on life paper, I got really good at ignoring myself. So I numbed with
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:49.006)
with all kinds of things, I conformed, I did what was expected, I told myself I should be happy because everything looked right, right? It was good on the outside. So then when people asked me, what do you want? What’s next for you? What do you really desire? Or I started asking myself those questions. I honestly thought I didn’t know. And I thought I didn’t know because it had been so long since I answered those things honestly that I really, wasn’t practiced at listening to myself.
But the truth was that wasn’t true. didn’t, I thought I didn’t know, but I didn’t know. I just didn’t feel safe to listen to it. I didn’t feel safe hearing it. I didn’t feel safe answering it for myself, not even quietly to me or in a journal, but out loud to other human beings. Because the real answers were big. The real answers, if I’m being honest, were very inconvenient at that time in my life. The real answers threatened the neat little plan I had for my life.
go to this high school, go to this college, get a degree, get a job, make this amount of money, create a family, blah, blah, right? Have something that looks good on paper. The very first desire that bubbled up that the one that I really didn’t wanna hear was I don’t want this, right? I could see where I was, I could see where my career was going, I don’t want this. And underneath that was I wanted a different career, I wanted a different relationship, I wanted a different lifestyle, I wanted a different relationship with me.
But all of those desires didn’t fit into the timeline, the expectations, the version of adulthood that I thought I was supposed to live. They were inconvenience. didn’t, inconvenient. They did not keep the peace. were not, they definitely did not keep the peace in my life and with people like my parents, right? So my nervous system did what it was supposed to do. It protected me. It kept those desires kind of pushed down. It kept me showing up to this job and doing this life, living this life that.
maybe wasn’t my life. And I interpreted the whole, the quiet as confusion. I interpreted the protection as failure, as like this weird emptiness. But in fact, it was just protection. It was just me feeling unsafe and my body and brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. So here’s what I want you to hear. Women rarely say, I don’t know what I want because they’re confused. They say it because they’ve been conditioned to stop trusting themselves.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:10.68)
They’ve learned over the course of their lifetime to stop trusting themselves. When we were young, we were told, you don’t really want that. You can’t have that. That doesn’t make sense. Don’t dream too big. You’re too this. Don’t dream too small. That’s not practical. That’s not appropriate. That’s never possible for you. Like finish your plate when you’re not hungry. Eat when you’re full, right? Like all these things. We were just, you can’t be hungry. You just had food, right? We, like these little pieces we learned over and over again to not trust ourselves.
and then we stop trusting ourselves and we think that our desires aren’t safe guidance. We learn to look outside of ourself for direction and guidance, thinking that somebody outside of us knows better than what’s happening within us. Those better than, knows better, what’s better for us than us. We learn to value other people’s opinions more than our own inner wisdom and we became experts, some of us very, very good at this, at reading the room instead of reading ourselves, at behaving how we thought we were supposed to behave instead of how we wanted to in accordance with us.
And we started asking, just tell me the path, tell me what I should want, tell me the perfect routine that will make me successful, tell me the morning routine that will make me happy, tell me the exact order of the things that I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to do it, and then I will do it. We thought that if we followed the rules, life would feel good, but it doesn’t work that way, right? Feeling good, feeling proud of ourselves, having this eudaemonic, deep-seated sense of contentment doesn’t come from checking other people’s boxes. It comes from
Listening to ourselves and moving in that direction desire is an inside job No one outside of you has the information that you need to lead your life I want to say that again because it’s so important. No one No one outside of you has the information needed for you to live your life. They don’t have your intuition They don’t have your story. They don’t have your lived experience. They don’t have your emotional landscape. They don’t have your desires only you do
They have their things. have their stories and beliefs. They have their desires. They don’t have yours. And again, when we think about how most of us grow up, we learn to trust adults who say, that’s not practical to want to do that, or that’s never going to make you any money, or that’s not stable. And for them, they probably don’t even have the desire to do some of these things. So for them, of course, it doesn’t make sense to do it. But for you, it might.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:31.16)
Here’s where your nervous system comes in. Your body will always protect you from what feels dangerous. That’s one of its main jobs, right? It likes to conserve energy. It likes to protect you and keep you safe. It likes to seek out dopamine hits. If wanting something has ever led to disappointment, judgment, conflict, risk, shame, overwhelm, big uncontrollable change, or anything that feels slightly dangerous or uncomfortable or took energy, then your nervous system will protect you by quieting that desire.
Right, and like how many of us have had a desire to do something and then we’re met with failure or we’re met with judgment or we’re met with disappointment and then our nervous system learns, nope, not this route. So your nervous system will say, let’s not go there, it’s safer not to know. And when you say, don’t know what I want, what’s usually happening is your body is keeping you safe by keeping your desires quiet. So again, it’s not confusion, it’s protection.
And I know I’ve said that a couple times already, but I think it’s worth really repeating, right? When you’re confused, oftentimes it’s not confusion, it’s protection, masking as confusion. Because again, confusion is also more acceptable in the world than these other things. When you stop making yourself wrong for entering into the cycle of protection and creating safety for yourself, then clarity becomes a lot easier, right? And again, this is a practice of moving back to this place, but you can get there.
Okay, I see this with clients all the time. I’ll ask, what do you want? Or how do you want to feel? And I’ll get their like canned answer, right? The answer that they think they’re supposed to give or the one society approves with. Like, I want to be more consistent. I want to get healthier. I want to be more productive. But then we kind of, I check in, right? And usually I can see this on somebody’s face. I’ve done this long enough. I can kind of feel it. If anything were possible or acceptable, if no one else’s opinion mattered, if you were completely safe to what would you want, what would you choose? And very often they know, they already know.
They know the answer, right? And it might be something like a little unconventional or, and sometimes not even unconventional at all, just for them it feels like it was like it’s too big to name. It feels like they’re being greedy or arrogant or something like that, right? They are judging it because somebody else has judged at some point. A list comes out and it could be a long list, it could be a short list, but they know what they want. They have this like, this is what I’m looking for. This is how I wanna feel. And if they don’t, oftentimes we just need to pause a little bit longer and get to,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:55.244)
kind of make it a little safer for their nervous system. The desires are there. They just need safety. This part of you wants to speak, it just needs permission. It needs the, it’s kind of like a seed. It will only sprout if it has the right conditions, right? This part of you will only start to speak and come out if there are the right conditions. This is why I’m running a workshop that starts, I think this is gonna air on Christmas. So Merry Christmas if you’re listening to this.
Becoming Her 2026, and this is, you know, I kind of started off as a goals workshop because I’ve done that a few years in a row. I don’t think I did one last year, but in the past I’ve done them around this time of year and they’re really fun. I love setting goals this time of year. I love reflecting on how the past has been. Well, let me say I love setting goals the way I set goals now. Reflecting on the last year, kind of luxuriating in the bounty of what I have created.
taking responsibility for what I created that maybe I didn’t love, and then choosing how to move into the next year. I wanna run something like that for you, where you get to think about who you’re becoming within the next year. Most of us have never been taught how to ask ourselves these questions from a place of safety. Most of us have never set goals, set intentions from this place of what if anything’s possible? What if it was safe to actually name what you really wanted?
What if you could put it on paper? What if you could speak it aloud to yourself or to me? This is where positive self-regard starts to come in, right? So when you trust yourself and meet yourself with warmth and trust and compassion and curiosity, your desires will start to feel less threatening. Positive self-regard sounds like I’m worth listening to, my desires matter, I could trust myself, I don’t have to abandon myself to be safe. And from that place, desire gets even louder, more clear, more honest. gets, it’s more accessible for you.
So your identity starts shifting from I’m inconsistent, I’m behind, I’m too much, I’m not enough to I’m someone who knows what she wants. I’m someone who can hear herself. I’m someone who can trust her own path. I believe that I’m moving in the direction that I want to be moving. The identity, this identity, this one that’s founded with this positive self-regard for yourself is the foundation of real aligned goals. And it’s something we’re gonna work on in the next year, big time in the courses that I’m running, but
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:17.614)
really seriously within this goals course. So the gentle practice that I wanna give you here so that you can take something away from this episode is taking a few slow breaths, right? And asking yourself if anything were possible or acceptable, if no one else knew the answer, what would I want for me? And ask it 10, 15, 20 times. Maybe even try to answer it 100 times. What would I want?
and just let the answers come in a sort of stream of consciousness. So you could write this down, you could speak it out loud and record it, but try not to judge them or analyze them in the moment. See if you can just receive them and listen to them. See if you can let yourself fill out a hundred lines of what you want. And it could be anything from something really small to something really big. Starting to listen to yourself, starting to give yourself the space to answers, how you start to rebuild trust and reconnect with your desires and how you come back to yourself.
It’s also a really fun practice to ask yourself what you want and just give yourself like full reign. You know, like, I don’t know if you did this as a kid, but when I made my Christmas list, I were like, I mean, it was what I wanted. It was a lot of stuff. Okay, so if this conversation is landing for you and if you’re noticing how much perhaps you’ve silenced your own voice and you’re feeling maybe the spark of possibility inside yourself, I want to invite you to this workshop, right? Becoming Her, It’s the Third Way to Set Goals. It’s not a goals workshop, it’s a becoming workshop.
because you can actually shape and form your next year from a place of powerful co-creation. Over three days, it’s designed to help you feel safe wanting what you want, hear yourself again, uncover your purpose and your goals that actually belong to you, right? So a larger purpose and then intentions and goals within that and step into the identity of the woman you’re becoming over the next year, the next decade, whatever timeline you’re thinking of.
and creating a plan that feels aligned, grounded and honest. You’ll walk away from this workshop that we’re doing together with relief and clarity, with some excitement, possibility, a deeper relationship to yourself or the beginning of that deeper relationship with yourself and the courage to start taking aligned steps. Not that you have to do it perfectly, but that you start a practice of moving in that direction. This workshop will change the way you set goals for yourself for the rest of your life and you will start to feel like me who feels so excited to do this again for the year coming up.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (18:42.046)
or like the people in the Life Lab who love our monthly sessions that we do that are very similar to this. So this, you’re in the life courses for the next year, this is part of it. It’s a bonus that was there. And if you are not, but you just wanna do this, it’s $99. If you want clarity, alignment, identity, and safety, if you’re done with hustle, pressure, and perfection, come join me. It’s where becoming begins. Thank you so much for listening to me.
today, for listening today, I guess, instead of just to me. But for listening today, I hope that this episode helped you feel less alone and reminded you that you’re not confused, but you’re protected, that in fact, your body and brain are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. And you can notice that and have compassion for it. And then you can start to shift. Clarity isn’t something that you force. It’s something that emerges when you feel safe enough to hear yourself. If you feel called, I would love to see you inside the workshop. We’re running this December 29th, 30th and 31st. So right on the precipice of the new year.
I’m so excited for it. It’s three days. It’s going to be amazing. I’m so, I can’t wait to do it for myself. So thank you for listening here and I will see you either on the next episode or in the workshop.
