The tricky but critical question – what do you really want?
Have you ever had one of those super awkward conversations with a good friend where they’re talking about a new job that they are considering or whether they should get married or divorced… and the more you listen to them you more the more you realize that they’re asking the wrong question and therefore coming up with the wrong answer?
And even worse you know you can’t answer the question for them that they have to find and own the answer themselves…
But somehow you still kind of want to get them to what you think is the right place…
It sucks,
You’re kind of doomed,
And hopefully you won’t won’t ruin your friendship,
I think this can happen with disability services and benefits… we get wrapped up in what we can get or see Right Now and forget to consider what we really want and what our long term objectives really are,
How do we avoid this trap?
(and not stress out ourselves or our friends)?
Approach 1 – Pushing the big “Goal”
One way to get out this is work and push and needle and drive to get to what your big goal is.
Repeatedly ask “why”…
There is a “5 whys” technique … where you you ask “why” to an answer to repeatedly to drill down to the real underlying reason…(try to do it nicely :) )…
Why do you want this job?… What is this job going to do for you? Where do you want your career to go? What is your personal life objective? What is your professional life objective? Is this moving you towards what you want?
Do you want to get married? Be financially independent? – maybe you could consider forgoing disability benefits that you are eligible for?
Have your child learn to be independent? Maybe you should opt out of a one-on-one aide?
Can you push through all of the immediate “stuff” to find your big goal?
Approach 2 – Invert – What DON’T you want?
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
We found our big education goal for my disabled son in a completely different and worse way: we had a triennial IEP meeting in second grade where the school team just flat out said “Don’t worry… your kid’s going to be in special education school services until they’re 22 so grades aren’t important.”
It was a kick in the head.
But ..
It gave us our big educational goal for our son that drives everything with his school:
a high school diploma or as close as possible
if vocational training was where we were going, we had YEARS and YEARS before we needed to even consider making that decision. Until then, let’s do the work to get that diploma!
What don’t you want? Where don’t you want to go? What could go wrong?
What are all the outcomes that you want to avoid?… and are your choices helping you avoid them?
Getting to what you really want
I’m not sure if there is a “right” way to answer this question… and it is certainly true that your answer may change. But, whatever that answer is, knowing it and using it to help make disability (and other) decisions for what to do… or not to do.
