The Desire Map

Picture this: you're sitting by the fireplace on New Year's Eve, armed with poster board and colored pens, ready to map out your dreams for the coming year. You dutifully write down goals like "lose ten pounds," "get promoted," "buy a house," and "travel to Europe." But something feels hollow about this exercise. Despite your best intentions, these goals feel more like obligations than inspirations, more like items to check off than pathways to joy.

This scenario captures a fundamental flaw in how most of us approach goal-setting. We focus obsessively on external achievements while ignoring the most crucial question: How do we actually want to feel when we reach these milestones? We chase promotions hoping they'll make us feel confident, pursue relationships hoping they'll make us feel loved, and accumulate possessions hoping they'll make us feel secure. Yet we rarely pause to examine whether our chosen paths will truly generate the feelings we're seeking. This book offers a revolutionary approach that flips traditional goal-setting on its head, teaching us to identify our core desired feelings first, then craft our lives around generating those feelings every single day.

LaPorte recounts her transformative New Year's Eve evening when everything shifted. She and her then-husband were mapping out their annual goals in familiar categories: career, money, home, relationships. They wrote down practical aspirations like "new kitchen table," "pay off credit card," and "publishing deal." But something felt mechanical about the process. In a moment of inspiration, LaPorte grabbed a different colored pen and began scrawling feeling words across each section: "Freedom!" "Abundance." "Sexy." "Connected." "Creative." Suddenly, the exercise transformed from a chore into an invitation.

As they explored how they wanted to feel in each area of their lives, their goals naturally evolved. Instead of simply wanting a kitchen table, they envisioned hosting monthly dinner parties where they'd feel connected and creative. The sterile goal of "make money" became "create liberation" with the underlying desire for freedom and abundance. This shift from external targets to internal states created what LaPorte calls "goals with soul" - aspirations that energize rather than drain, inspire rather than pressure. The revelation was profound: when we anchor our intentions in desired feelings, we stop proving ourselves to the world and start living authentically. We discover that the journey toward our dreams can feel as fulfilling as reaching them, because we're generating the very feelings we seek every step of the way.

Traditional achievement culture pathologizes feelings, treating them as obstacles to productivity rather than compass points toward fulfillment. LaPorte shares the story of a university student studying finance who freely admitted she "pretty much hated" her chosen field but was pursuing it because "being an accountant is good money" and her father was paying tuition. This young woman had disconnected from her inner guidance system entirely, choosing a life path based on external validation and financial security rather than any consideration of how she wanted to spend her days or what would bring her alive.

This scenario represents an epidemic of feeling-divorced goal-setting that leads to what LaPorte calls "Mercedes and Prozac" outcomes - external success coupled with internal emptiness. When we make decisions based solely on what looks good on paper or what others expect of us, we create lives that feel foreign to our souls. The alternative isn't to abandon ambition but to ensure our ambitions serve our deepest desires for fulfillment. LaPorte argues that feelings aren't frivolous distractions from serious goal-setting; they're the most reliable indicators of whether we're moving toward or away from our true nature. When we honor the intelligence of our emotions, we create sustainable motivation because we're fueled by authentic desire rather than external pressure. The result is a life that feels as good as it looks, where success is measured not just by achievements but by the quality of our daily experience.

LaPorte describes meeting the beloved author SARK at a cocktail party and asking for any wisdom she'd share. Without hesitation, SARK looked her straight in the eye and said, "No striving." They chanted it together like pretty witches: "No striving! No striving!" SARK explained how she'd transformed her publishing empire by refusing flashy offers that didn't align with her core desire to feel "juiced." She'd redefined success entirely around feeling good, which paradoxically led to even greater prosperity.

This encounter illuminated the difference between driven ambition and inspired action. Striving implies force, desperation, and the belief that we must push against life to get what we want. Thriving suggests flow, trust, and alignment with natural energy currents. LaPorte learned that when she chose opportunities based on how they would make her feel rather than how they would make her look, everything improved. She could decline speaking engagements that felt off even if they offered good money and exposure, trusting that better-aligned opportunities would appear. This shift from achievement at any cost to selective, soul-aligned action requires courage because it means saying no to things that seem objectively good but don't serve our deeper desires. Yet this discrimination is precisely what transforms ambition from a source of anxiety into a source of joy. When our goals emerge from authentic desire rather than external pressure, pursuing them becomes an act of self-love rather than self-improvement.

During a painful conflict with her partner, LaPorte found herself trapped in mental loops of analysis and blame. She was angry about something he'd done repeatedly despite her requests, and her mind was churning through familiar patterns: "He can be such an asshole. No... I'm such an asshole for thinking he's such an asshole." She cycled through self-criticism, psychological analysis, and attempts at positive thinking, but nothing actually helped her feel better. The mental chatter only prolonged the emotional pain and kept her disconnected from her power to change the situation.

In that moment of frustration, she remembered her core desired feelings and quietly said to herself, "I desire light. What I really want is fluidity. I'd prefer communion." This simple practice interrupted her mental jackhammering and reconnected her to her essential nature. Instead of trying to think her way out of negative feelings, she reminded herself of what she truly wanted to experience. This wasn't denial of her anger or spiritual bypassing; it was using desire as a bridge back to her center. LaPorte discovered that our deepest desires act as internal GPS systems, always pointing us toward home - toward the feelings and experiences that represent our truest selves. When we're lost in reactivity or despair, remembering what we desire most can be the fastest path back to clarity and empowerment. This practice transforms desire from wishful thinking into a practical tool for emotional regulation and conscious living.

LaPorte reveals her current core desired feelings: Joy, The Divine Feminine, Affluence, Creative, and In Communion. She explains how she uses these as daily guidance, making both minor and major life decisions through the filter of these desired states. When she's not feeling particularly goddess-like on a given day, generating "divinely feminine" might be as simple as choosing to wear a skirt instead of yoga pants. When she's feeling financially tight, she might sit on an expensive Italian sofa at a furniture store to embody the feeling of affluence, knowing that inhabiting the energy of what we want helps magnetize it into our lives.

The key insight is that we don't need to make dramatic changes to begin feeling the way we want to feel. Small, deliberate actions inspired by our core desired feelings create incremental shifts that compound over time. LaPorte suggests asking ourselves regularly: "What do I need to do today to feel the way I want to feel?" This question transforms daily planning from task management into conscious creation. Instead of just getting things done, we're generating specific emotional states that align with our deepest values and desires. These micro-choices - whether to text our partner something sweet, book a weekend getaway, or simply take five deep breaths - become acts of self-authorship. We're no longer victims of circumstance but active creators of our emotional landscape, using desire not as escapism but as fuel for building lives that feel as good as they look from the inside out.

This revolutionary approach to goal-setting reveals that we've been approaching success backwards, chasing external achievements while ignoring the internal experiences we're really seeking. The most profound realization is that our feelings aren't byproducts of success - they are the true measures of it. When we get clear on how we want to feel and then reverse-engineer our goals to serve those feelings, we stop proving ourselves to the world and start living authentically. Every choice becomes an opportunity to either move closer to or further from our desired emotional states.

The practice is elegantly simple yet radically transformative: identify your core desired feelings, then ask yourself daily what you need to do to generate those feelings. This shifts us from reactive living to conscious creation, from striving to thriving. Whether we're choosing what to wear, whom to spend time with, or which opportunities to pursue, we have a reliable internal compass guiding us toward choices that serve our souls. The result is a life that feels sustainable and joyful because we're no longer fighting against our nature but flowing with it, creating success that nourishes rather than depletes us.