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 blessing 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.
God wants to give us the desires of our heart. We become what we think about most of the time. That is why we are to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5). Doing this places hedges against allowing 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.
We are created in the image of God. His spirit propels us to create a life with all the wonderful gifts He has given us. I imagine He intends for us to be life designers. Sin has infected our beings and screams at us, telling you who you are. We hear this and we believe the continual iterations. When we see this world, we notice the corrosive effects of sin and believe 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. We need to strengthen our God given imagination and believe that God is who He says He is. “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us…” (Ephesians 3:20).
Many Christians will say, “Well, I want what God wants for my life.” This is an excellent desire that everyone needs to have at the fore. God has given us the freedom of choice as a gift and He invites us to exercise that freedom in how we design our lives. We are children of the King, Master Creator and Designer of all that is good! The mind of God designed the grand architecture of existence and His Word created a world vibrant with life, animation, color, and nuance. I imagine He relishes seeing the joy, enthusiasm, and peace on the faces of His children who are human while being deliberate in designing a life reflective of the Creator’s power at work in them. Keeping an attentive ear to the Shepard’s voice, we are free to create the life we desire. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you…” (Matthew 7:7).
Picture Billy in his room building a massive Lego compound, crafting it just the way he wants! He builds the Lego structure and then realizes he needs a fortress surrounding the compound, so he tips over his desk and encapsulates his creation. All of those instruments he used to create his design were provided by his parents. Billy’s dad calls out, “Billy, we gotta get to your dentist appointment, so you need to get ready. Oh, and please help your sister…she is having trouble with something in her room.” Billy isn’t quite finished, but he sits on his bed and puts his shoes on. He goes to help his sister, gets in the car, and goes to the dentist. When he gets home, his wonderful design is waiting on him to reengage. The meaning is not hidden in this illustration. We have all of these wonderful instruments that God provides for us, and we are free to use them to design, color, and animate our lives. However, we must keep an attentive ear and listen to the Master Designer for when He calls us to be His instrument. When He calls us, we are to listen and obey because there is sufficient evidence that He has our and everyone else’s best interest in mind. Wow! The mind of God! Now that is an expansive thought!
The Ten Commandments are quite freeing. God gave us His law as parameters to keep us safe. Everything within those parameters is available to us, so we can design the life that we desire. With God rightly at the helm, faith, imagination, intention, and desire all converge to give rise to the life we imagine for ourselves. So, what about when things are going wrong? It is important to understand how to use desire effectively. It is fairly simple.
We all go through fearful experiences at one point or another in our lives. Most negative experiences in life are derivatives of fear, insecurity, and doubt. What we don’t realize is that these anxiety-based attributes prolong unsavory situations. The body’s response/reaction to internal or external stimuli is where it will focus its attention. Fear permeates the mind with insecurity and doubt, telling you who you are and what to imagine will be. It clouds the thinking and focuses our attention to narrowly scan for solutions. When this occurs, many Christians will pray but still fear. We must pray and wonder; be curious and wonder how God will work within your circumstances. Realizing a sense of pure wonder allows for our Creator God to create a pathway into peaceful pastures. Wonder despite circumstances broadens our radar. Our intentional display of wonder coupled with desiring God to shape our vision allows for the Holy Spirit to tap your shoulder and point; then, we look and can see.
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 postgraduate 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 and Coaches are not supposed to make any guarantees, but I am very confident this will help you become the person you want to be.
Here is the information about the Desires technique and how to implement it:
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.
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 want to become. I had another client who wrote “I Desire…” at the top of her list and wrote the rest in bullet points of incomplete sentences. This exercise is to be written without shortcuts or modifications. 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:
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. 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!
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 affect 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 law and grace. You will stop struggling and will truly begin choosing to live the life you desire.
Right about now, you are probably thinking, Ken! you are getting a little out there with all this talk about the subconscious mind. I understand that we must be careful when dealing with matters of the mind. The thing is, ignoring these mind mechanisms allows for Satan to insidiously influence our thoughts to cleverly influence the subconscious mind. By writing down our desire to live a life steeped within God’s way, we are placing hedges at the deepest level of our psyche.
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.
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!
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