There is a story about Bill Clinton, from early in his presidency. He walks through one of the rougher parts of a city, baseball cap on, Secret Service a few steps back, trying to get a feel for people. A woman recognises him and starts talking. She goes for a while. She is not quiet, and she is not short on complaints. The streets are dangerous, the schools are falling apart, the drugs are everywhere, the jobs don’t pay, nothing is working, nobody is helping.

Clinton listens. All the way through. He does not interrupt. When she finally stops, he looks at her and says: “Ma’am, what do you want?”

She starts again on the list of things that are broken. He waits her out. Then he asks again. “What do you want?”

She pauses this time. And then, slowly, differently, she says: safer streets for the kids. Better jobs so the husbands can earn. Drug dealers off the corner.

Three things. All in the positive. All concrete. All actionable.

The two lists were different lengths. The problem list was infinite. The want list was three.

The move

This is called the Lazarus technique, named after the psychotherapist Arnold Lazarus. The whole thing fits in three steps.

1.  Let it out. All of it.
    Problems, complaints, worries, grievances.
    Don't argue with any of it yet.

2.  Ask: "What do you want?"
    Stated in the positive. Not the absence of
    a bad thing. The presence of a good one.

3.  Reduce it to ONE WORD.
    One. The forcing function. It makes you
    pick what you actually want above all the
    rest.

The last step is the one that does the work. Three things is useful. One word is a compass.

Why “not” doesn’t help

Most people, when asked what they want, answer with a not.

"I don't want to feel anxious."
"I don't want them to keep doing that."
"I don't want this to go wrong."
"I don't want to be stuck."

Negatives don’t tell you what to do. They only tell you what to run from. You can run away from a thing for a lifetime and still never arrive anywhere, because away-from is not a direction. Toward-what is.

Switch the sentence.

"I want to feel steady."
"I want them to listen when I speak."
"I want this to go well."
"I want to be moving."

Different sentences. Different Mondays. Different next steps.

The one word is the hard part

Three things in the positive is good. One word is better. Here’s why.

Three competing wants are three competing directions. You can still get stuck between them. The forcing function of a single word makes you rank your wants, which is the thing you were quietly avoiding.

Common one-words that come out of this exercise:

peace       respect       space
clarity     closure       home
safety      honesty       progress

Pick one. Don’t pick two. Two is cheating. The whole exercise is you refusing to let yourself off the hook until you’ve chosen.

Then once you have the word, every decision gets a filter. “Does this move me toward [the word] or away from it?” That one filter cuts out a surprising amount of noise.

Try it right now

Pick a thing in your life that has been nagging at you. Any size. The thing you keep complaining about to yourself in the shower.

1. Write the full mess:
   ____________________________________________

2. Rewrite it as what you want, in the positive:
   ____________________________________________

3. Reduce it to one word:
   ____________________________________________

Ten minutes. The gap between page one and page three is often the whole situation.

The one line

If you keep nothing else from this post, keep this:

Away-from is not a direction. Toward-what is. Pick one word, and you can walk somewhere.

Most of the time you’re not stuck because the situation is unsolvable. You’re stuck because you’ve been describing the situation in negatives, which gives you nothing to walk toward. The move is to translate the complaint into a want, and the want into one word. The one word is the compass. Everything else follows from being able to look at it and ask: am I going the right way?

This is not clinical or medical advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, talk to a qualified professional. These are personal notes, worked through in my own words.