My name is Ken Knoechel. I’m so glad that you are taking the time to review this information. I believe you will receive a wonderful sense of calm and competence as you read this manuscript. The ideas presented here discuss what I believe to be the most powerful tool that individuals can use to intentionally pursue their desires, develop attributes, and shape who they are becoming. You may recognize some peculiarities to my therapeutic style, but believe me, everything is intentionally purposed. I want to focus your mind. From here on out, I want you to think of your thoughts as tangible instruments used to shape your mind and design your life. They are generated either reflexively or intentionally. When someone is experiencing frustration, anger, or anxiety, they tend to be more reflexive rather than intentionally responsive. You can train your mind to think the thoughts you desire because you are choosing to do so. For a lot of people, that’s easier said than done.
Instrumental Imagination
We must not allow our imagination to begin germinating seeds of insecurity and doubt. When we passively allow unhelpful thoughts to dominate our thinking, they take root and our imaginations begin to form the unhelpful lens through which we see the world around us. We need to intentionally direct our thoughts and make deliberate choices for the perspectives we entertain.
I want you to be able to design who you are becoming with intention.
The world we live in has infected our subconscious minds with varying degrees of traumatic experiences. Your subconscious mind screams at you, telling you who you are and what to imagine will be. You hear this and you begin to believe the continual insults, telling you that you are not enough. When we see this world, we notice the emotional desperation, and this conditions our thinking into believing we are limited to only that which we already see in our lives. Guilt and shame tell us we are undeserving of a better life, so we seek comfort in the patterns of what we observe in ourselves and the world around us. Believing in the permanency of those patterns is what carves deep grooves within our subconscious mind.
What About Fearful Experiences
We all go through fearful experiences at one point in our lives. Most negative thoughts and experiences in life are derivatives of fear. What we don’t realize is that fear prolongs unsavory situations. The body’s reaction to internal or external stimuli is where it will focus its attention. Fear infects the mind with insecurity, telling you who you are and what to imagine will be. It clouds the thinking and focuses our attention to narrowly scan for solutions. You must wonder; be curious and wonder how things work together within your circumstances. Realizing a sense of pure wonder does something to our perception and focus. Wonder despite circumstances broadens our radar. Our intentional display of wonder coupled with our potent desire is fundamental to reframing perspective.
Below, I am providing you with a technique that I encourage all of my clients to use in order to design a life they want to live in. It may seem quite elementary, but this is how you can begin to intentionally exhibit self-control over your emotions and thinking patterns. I have coached a variety of populations, from high school students to postgrad professionals. They all are very encouraged by what this technique does to their thinking and focus as they move toward the life they desire. I believe this will work magnificently in a person’s life, no matter if they are a child or traversing their golden years. Therapists/Coaches are not supposed to make any guarantees, but I am very confident this will help you become the person you want to be. Below is the information about the Desires technique and how to implement it.
Desires Technique
Think of five things that you desire, five simple but comprehensive desires that you want to do, be or have. They should be simple yet actionable. Use an ink pen with blue or black ink, never a pencil, and write your name in its possessive form, Desires, followed by the date on a piece of paper dedicated to this activity. For example, Ken’s Desires – 01/01/2024. I recommend purchasing a 9 by 12-inch flip top sketchbook dedicated to this activity. Underneath your name, write each of your desires down, a new line for each. When you write down your desires, you are not writing down what you don’t want. For example, “I don’t want to be anxious” is not how you become calm. You write down “I desire becoming calm.” You are to focus on the abundance of what you desire, not the lack of it. This is important! You are to focus on the abundance of what you desire, not the lack of it.
When writing down your desires, you can harness them by actively engaging with your desires in the present tense, emphasizing action and being in a state of realization. It is helpful for you, when articulating desires, to frame them as ongoing actions toward their continuous and active display in your life. For instance, instead of passively stating a desire or a static state of being, such as “I desire happiness,” it would be more potent to express it as “I desire experiencing happiness.” The i-n-g form is utilized in progressive verb tenses alongside auxiliary verbs, which create the active voice. By using i-n-g words, you place yourselves in the middle of the action, thereby activating a natural and quite reflexive momentum toward what you desire. By using i-n-g you put yourself in the dynamic state of becoming. You do not desire to be human…you are a human being.
Every morning or evening, repeat the same process, write the SAME five things down. Beginning this activity, there will be modifications and changes in what you desire. As the neural circuitry begins to shift, new ways of thinking will help you realize what you truly desire. The goal is to settle into the grooves of your desire within a couple weeks. After you create an actionable and simple yet descriptive and focused list of desires, write these down every single day. After a couple weeks of doing this exercise, the desires should be written by memory. Each day that you do this with intention, you are changing the hardware running in the background. The subconscious is always running in the background, always motivating your thoughts and behavior.
Adherence To Guidelines
I was in session with a client and we were going over this information. I told her that she needed to use an ink pen for this exercise and her eyes became big as saucers! “Ken! I never write with ink…what if I mess up?” The permanency of pen ink sends a clear message to the subconscious that you are making intentional, deliberate, and permanent plans for who you desire becoming. I had another client who wrote “I Desire…” at the top of her list and wrote the rest in bullet points of incomplete sentences. It is important that you write out the entire sentence for each desire. To give you an idea of how this exercise is constructed, here are a few desires that I find helpful. Please come up with a list of desires that are meaningful to you, but please use the format below when creating that list of your Desires:
- I desire making and maintaining intimate connections.
- I desire becoming confident and competent.
- I desire being healthy and experiencing wellness.
- I desire being safe and secure.
- I desire happily engaging others.
Creating your own Desires is important as you are rewriting/overwriting the detrimental scripts that play on repeat in your subconscious mind. You have gone through life picking up different ideations. Moreover, the ideation patterns that tend to stick are the ones that we perceive will keep us safe, both emotionally and physically. Instead of creating the space we want in our lives, we tend to just take whatever is immediately accessible to make us “feel” safe or comfortable in the moment. Your subconscious gets imprinted with this high alert state of mind, especially if you have gone through traumatic experiences. I think you would agree that thoughts, especially anxious ones, tend to be very ominous and ambiguous. These thoughts are most always quite reflexive and unhelpful, unless they are used for the purpose with which they are intended. To run or fight!
Benefits to Anticipate
When you write down what you desire, you are sending many messages to yourself that may seem insignificant, but the continual repetition of defining what you desire and who you are becoming has a powerful effect on your subconscious. Some examples for the types of messages you are sending: I am setting time aside to do this, so it is important; I created a thought/desire and I’m designing a permanent representation of that desire; these desires must be important because I’m organizing my thoughts around them, so other conflicting/ambiguous thoughts must be de-prioritized.
The effect you will experience when you commit to writing down your Desires every day is multifaceted. Many people claim that their thinking becomes much clearer and focused. You will begin choosing how you think and what perspectives to entertain. You will become more deliberate and creative with how you communicate and how you facilitate getting your needs met. You will begin understanding how to shape the person that you are becoming. You will develop a sense of curiosity as your thinking begins to change. It is incredible what you will accomplish when you control your emotions and choose how to see things in your life. At the very least, you will experience peace. You will find that you can easily choose to not engage in disparaging self-criticism as you will begin understanding the relationship between asserting yourself and showing compassion. You will stop struggling and will truly begin choosing to live the life you desire.
We get what we think about most of the time. Writing down your desires creates your intentions and they are real, not just wishes. The outcomes that you desire will begin matching your intentions of obtaining the life that you desire and develop healthy thinking patterns.
The word manifestation comes to mind, but it is more about keeping what you desire in front of you. By doing so, you will begin noticing opportunities that will exercise your mind to believe you can attain a desirable life.
Final Thoughts
With writing down your desires, you are changing your reactive impulses to intentional responses when challenges arise, helping you to exhibit poise and character under pressure. You will seek to conform to your stated desires rather than to some primal need for emotional survival. If you don’t define what you want, what you want will be defined for you. Simple as that!
Please let me know if you have any questions.