What’s holding you back from truly understanding your deepest desires? How can you better recognize the emotions that guide your daily choices?
Learning how to connect with your emotions is a transformative journey that begins with self-examination. In The Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte offers a fresh approach to goal-setting by focusing on feelings rather than actions. She helps you explore your core values, natural talents, and what brings you genuine joy.
Read more to discover powerful questions and practical techniques that will help you unlock a deeper understanding of yourself and your emotional landscape.
Connect With Your Emotions
LaPorte says that you should set goals that reflect who you are and fulfill your deep-seated desires, but you may find that you don’t really know who you are and what you want. Therefore, the first step in this process is to conduct a thorough examination of yourself.
LaPorte offers advice on how to connect with your emotions and desires, sharing a series of questions that help get you into a reflective mindset. She encourages you to answer each question with a sentence or two. A few of these questions include:
- What are your values? Think about which personal qualities are most important to you and which qualities you can’t stand in yourself or others. Alternatively, consider which core beliefs (religious or secular) guide your day-to-day actions.
- What brings you joy? For example, this might be a loved one or a pet, a certain activity that you really enjoy, or a material possession that’s very important to you.
- What do you naturally excel at? Think about where your natural talents and interests lie.
- Why do you push through difficult situations? Note that the question is not how, but why—think about what keeps you going when you’re frustrated, tired, or upset.
- What do you want more of in your life? LaPorte urges you to think of answers beyond “time” and “money,” because those things are just means to an end. For example, if you feel lonely, then you likely want more love in your life; if you’re often bored, then perhaps you want more purpose.
| Ikigai: Your Life’s Purpose LaPorte’s method of figuring out what you want in life closely resembles the Japanese idea of finding your ikigai: your reason for being. In their book of the same name, self-help writers Héctor García and Francesc Miralles say that you can find your ikigai by answering four questions: 1. What do you love to do? This is similar to LaPorte’s suggestion to ask what brings you joy, but García and Miralles ask you to focus on tasks: What activities do you really enjoy doing? What tasks tend to bring a sense of satisfaction once they’re done? 2. What are you good at? This is the same as LaPorte’s question: What do you naturally excel at? 3. What does the world need? People tend to find fulfillment in being useful to others—and this is especially true in Japanese culture, which places far less importance on individualism than many Western cultures do. Therefore, this question asks how you can make yourself useful: What can you do to make the world a better place in some small way? 4. What can you get paid to do? Unless you’re lucky enough to be independently wealthy, your life’s purpose will have to be something that you can sustain yourself with. First, answer each question separately, then look for answers that recur. For example, maybe you’re good at caretaking and the world needs more of that. Anything that meets all four criteria is a good candidate for your ikigai. However, in the context of The Desire Map, note that the concept of ikigai is based on the traditional method of goal-setting: It focuses on what you want to do. This is the primary way that it differs from LaPorte’s approach of determining how you want to feel. |
Self-Connection and Self-Reflection Are Ongoing Processes
LaPorte adds that recognizing and connecting with your innermost feelings is an everyday practice, not just something you do once and then forget about. She encourages developing emotional literacy through various means like art, music, and literature—indulge in experiences that evoke strong feelings inside of you, and pay attention to what those feelings are.
You can also learn more about emotions through your interactions with other people. Those experiences not only give you the opportunity to reflect on your own feelings but to study other people’s emotional responses as well.
Recall that your feelings, whether positive or negative, give you important feedback about the situations you find yourself in and the actions you take. Therefore, LaPorte urges you to pay continual special attention to the things that make you feel grateful as you go through your daily life—like your family and friends, your job, your hobbies, your health, and so on. Anything that you feel grateful for is fulfilling some deep-seated desire, even if you aren’t yet sure what that desire is.
You should also pay attention to what brings up feelings of frustration, dread, or boredom. LaPorte says such feelings are signs that some part of your life isn’t aligned with your true desires. It’s not always possible to change those parts of your life right away—for example, even if you dread going to work, you’re most likely not in a position to simply quit without first lining up a new source of income—but this is still important information that warrants further consideration.
| Tip: Improve Your Understanding by Increasing Your Vocabulary One obstacle that hinders many people from understanding their feelings is a lack of vocabulary to describe those feelings. In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown says that many people are only able to identify three emotions: sadness, happiness, and anger. As a result, even if they try to connect with their feelings like LaPorte discusses here, they won’t fully understand what they’re feeling. To remedy this, Brown suggests expanding your emotional vocabulary as part of self-connection and self-reflection. For example, Brown defines happiness simply as being pleased with your current situation. The definition is intentionally broad and vague, leaving room for you to explore what specific kind of pleasure you’re feeling. If you experience something that makes you briefly but intensely happy, you’re feeling joy. On the other hand, if you’ve just finished your work for the week and you’re now going into the weekend with a sense of calm satisfaction, you’re experiencing tranquility. Furthermore, while joy and tranquility could both be called “happiness,” they’re very different from one another, and the word happiness doesn’t fully explain either of them. Therefore, this example highlights the importance of knowing the right words to understand and identify your specific emotions. |
I’ve always believed that self-awareness is key to growth—would love to see more about how these methods could be applied in the workplace to foster better team dynamics!