You've Answered the Question — "What Do You Want?" — Now What?
I’m tired.
I can’t quite discern if it’s just physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, or a bit of both. But, I’ve reached the end of the week — the day when it’s time to write my weekly piece, and I’m tapped out!
Now, I could wallow and travel deep down the woes-me road. However, the truth is a lot of other people are exhausted right along with me. I mean: the state of the world is enough to tire anyone out.
But, I’m paying attention to a pattern that I suspect doesn’t just affect me.
I can start to feel like I’m crashing and need a really long nap right before the thing I said I wanted is about to come to fruition.
Can you relate?
I find the timing interesting. Because, in my experience, the fatigue sets in after I’ve been head down immersed in the deep work of whatever I needed to do — to do my part in bringing what I said I wanted to fruition.
The Waiting Space
Then comes the wait.
First, there’s the wait between figuring out what you want and asking for it. And this is followed by the wait of getting what you want.
I call the gap between wanting, asking, and getting the waiting space — and it can be tricky to navigate because that’s where a lot of things start to bubble up. It’s where:
courage sits next to fear
confidence sits next to self-doubt
conviction sits next to anxiety
And here’s the thing, if you don’t have a way to navigate what bubbles up, you may abandon the want — or shrink it — before you ever ask.
Or, you give up too soon and don’t follow through if your “want” doesn’t materialize according to your timeline.
This is why I say the waiting space is where wants quietly die — and most of us don’t even notice the funeral.
So, what do you and I do in the waiting space?
Most of us do one of three things, and none of them serve us:
We rush it — confusing motion with progress, busying ourselves into a version of the want that’s smaller, safer, and faster to reach. (Hello again to last week’s pitfall: confusing any action with the right action.)
We stall it — researching, planning, preparing, refining…doing everything except the asking. Productivity becomes the most sophisticated form of avoidance.
We abandon it — quietly deciding the want wasn’t that important after all. Or wasn’t realistic in the first place. Or wasn’t for us. We rewrite the story so the unasked question feels like a choice rather than a cost.
And here’s where the cost of the unasked starts to compound. (Click here if you missed week one in this series.)
Because every want that quietly dies in the waiting space teaches you something about yourself — usually the wrong thing.
It teaches you that your wants aren’t worth the discomfort of asking.
That the waiting itself is a sign you should turn back.
That fatigue is a verdict instead of a feature of the terrain.
It’s not.
The exhaustion I described at the start of this piece? I’ve come to understand it as a signal, not a stop sign.
It often shows up right before the breakthrough — not because something is wrong, but because something is about to shift. The waiting space asks something of you, and that something is rarely comfortable.
So this week, I want to invite you to notice your own waiting space.
Not to fix it. Not to rush through it. Just to notice.
What are you currently waiting on — between wanting and asking, or between asking and getting?
What’s bubbling up in that gap?
And what might it cost you if you don’t tend to what’s bubbling up?
Because here’s what I’m sitting with as I close out this tired week: the waiting space isn’t the obstacle to what you want. It’s the territory where what you want and ask for gets decided.
The question is whether you’ll stay in it long enough to find out.
About Jacquette
I love to ask questions and spark aha moments. I love to talk about why success with money is about more than just the numbers, and how the cultural impact on the intersection of money, business, and life matters–A LOT! And, I really hope I help people feel seen, heard, and not judged—especially since money is emotional and personal.
