If you ever want to feel your insides turn to jelly, one way is to consider pursuing something you really want, rather than what you’ve been told you should want. The jelly will be almost instantaneous. 

This is one of the reasons it’s easier to keep chasing the checkboxes of a one-size-fits-all good life instead of goals that are custom fit just for you. The emotional stakes of an externally imposed ideal of the good life are so much lower. For example, if you don’t achieve the highest heights of a career you didn’t really want in the first place, you might be disappointed, even devastated. But you will have the built-in consolation that you didn’t really want that career anyway — you were just doing it because it was practical, prestigious, lucrative, or something your parents wanted for you. 

On the other hand, if you want to feel seriously intimidated, think about going after the kind of life that would be deeply meaningful to you. This is not a reason to shy away from goals that really matter to you, but it is something to prepare for as you start to zero in on what you actually want. 

If you feel a stab of anxiety at the idea of a particular pursuit, it would be easy to interpret this as a signal that this pursuit is not for you. But what if it’s the opposite? It might be something you want so badly that the only thing worse than not even trying to achieve it is trying to achieve it and failing. The stakes of trying and failing feel so much lower when there is less emotional attachment to the outcome. Of course, this is also why checking the boxes on things we are told will make us happy often leads to a hollow feeling, rather than the happiness we were promised. Meanwhile, if we can just inch through our fear, the potential upside of going after a goal that really matters to us is limitless.

So how do you figure out whether a scary seeming goal is something you really want? With the magic bullet question: “If I took my ego out of it, would I want to attempt to achieve this goal, and invest time, energy, effort, and potentially money into pursuing it?” 

This question is a magic bullet because ego will keep you in a cage for the rest of your life if it thinks that would spare you (and it) humiliation. Ego doesn’t care if a goal would be a million times more fulfilling if you achieved it than it would be embarrassing if you didn’t. Ego only wants to save you (but really itself) from any confirmation of what it fears is the truth: that you (and it) are the butt of the joke. If ego needs to keep you in a cage to accomplish this, so be it. 

If you ask the magic bullet question and the answer is that without any ego involvement, you would still not do the thing, that probably means the goal in question is not really that interesting to you. If you ask the magic bullet question and the answer is that without any ego influence, you would absolutely invest time, energy, effort and potentially money into pursuing the thing, it’s a safe bet this pursuit is something that you really do want. 

After you’ve asked the magic bullet question and gotten the yes answer, what’s the next step? To borrow from the immortal words of Destiny’s Child, you get ready for the jelly. This means understanding that when you decide you really do want something at your core, you are going to suddenly feel very vulnerable, even if you haven’t yet decided that you are actually going to pursue it. That vulnerability is the ego again, trying to keep you (and it) safely in the cage. I call this feeling “pre-embarrassment”. You haven’t even taken a single step to attempt to pursue a heartfelt goal, but you already feel the naked humiliation of failing in front of the whole world. 

The ego tends to be very dramatic, and this feeling is very real. But if you think about it, the whole world will almost certainly never know about this goal, the fact that you are pursuing it, or whether or not you succeed. And even if they did, the lady-balls you showed in going after it would probably be an inspiration to at least one other person. That alone should be reason enough to pursue it, if only the ego would get out of the way. Getting ready for the jelly is how we come to our own ego-wrangling rescue.

So how do you get ready for the jelly? You accept a couple of things as truth. First, you accept that the feeling of vulnerability is telling you something: this goal is important to you. Second, you accept that there will be a couple of times when the vulnerability feels particularly intense: (1) while you are considering whether to take the leap; and (2) right after you have leapt. Why? Because of our old friend ego again. Ego knows that your taking action is a powerful antidote to the paralysis that ego imposes on you. So it makes a final, ultra-dramatic attempt to keep us safely in our cage, by ramping up the fear of taking action. 

This is not a reason to rush a decision in order to take action — if you’re like me you probably really do need time to research, process the options, and project a million different outcomes as though you have some kind of control over any of it. But once you do make the decision to pursue a goal, it’s really important to act quickly and take at least the first step towards it, before ego can start making a scene. You are especially jelly-esque at this point, because the ego is looking for any reason to show you that taking a chance on a dream is a terrible idea, and you are particularly vulnerable to believing whatever reasons the ego comes up with. So here is the workaround: take your time in making the decision, but as part of your decision-making process, make a list of the first few steps (or more) that you will take right away if you decide it’s a “yes”. This way you can minimize the amount of time between making the decision and taking action towards it, and limit ego’s ability to mess with your confidence and determination.

Let’s look at this process in the context of fitness. Say I keep thinking about taking dance classes, because whenever I see someone dancing, I think “that is what freedom looks like”. But when I think about actually being in a dance class, I feel a stab of anxiety and all I can think about are the downsides: forgetting the choreography, being uncoordinated, making a fool of myself, spending money on something I wouldn’t be good at anyway, and so on. 

I start by asking myself the magic bullet question to figure out if this is something I actually want. “If I took my ego out of it, would I want to attempt to achieve this goal, and invest time, energy, effort, and potentially money into pursuing it?” The answer is that if I could take my ego out of it, I would definitely want to learn how to dance. I don’t know which kind of dance yet, but I would love to learn to move my body in a different way, challenge my brain to learn something new, and find out if dancing is indeed what freedom looks like. 

Next, I get ready for the jelly. I accept that my feelings of vulnerability around taking dance classes means that this goal might be quite important to me. Then I remind myself that I probably will feel pretty vulnerable until I make a decision, and even more vulnerable if that decision is a yes, until I take my first steps to pursue the goal. With that in mind, as I start to research different types of dancing and weigh whether or not I’m going to actually try one out, I make sure my research includes listing out the steps I will take immediately after, if my decision is a yes. Those steps could include calling dance studios located near me to see what they would recommend for adult beginners, checking out the class schedule, asking friends if they would be interested in joining me, booking my first class, making sure I have clothes I feel comfortable in, buying the required equipment, and – most importantly – actually going to the first class.

Knowledge is power, and it’s a powerful tool to know that really wanting something (as opposed to defaulting to what you’re told to want) can make you feel pretty wobbly. Use the magic bullet question to help you identify what you truly want. Then get ready for the jelly by accepting vulnerable feelings as a good sign, and building into your decision making process a plan for taking the first steps to pursue your goal. If you try this out, I’d love to hear how it goes for you! Let me know in the comments. I know you are ready for this jelly, and I hope these tools help you discover that you are too.