I'm Chasing Something I Never Chose: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I'm Chasing Something I Never Chose, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Values clarification
Name the directions you want your life to move in, distinct from goals you can check off.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Made Practical - Dedicate yourself to a cause beyond yourself
Commit time and effort to something larger than your own interests.
Self-Transcendence: Beyond the Self - Embracing necessary missing-out
Accept that every yes is a thousand noes — and choose anyway.
Four Thousand Weeks, Made Practical - Identity-based habits
“Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
Atomic Habits, Made Practical - Replace specific goals with a guiding direction
A compass bearing keeps you moving without closing off the exact route or destination.
Goal-Free Living: When Process Beats Destination - Examining the desire before chasing it
Before pursuing something you want, ask whether the desire serves you or consumes you.
Santosha: The Practice of Contentment - Classifying desires before pursuing them
Before pursuing a desire, classify it: is it natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary, or vain?
Epicurean Philosophy: Practical Happiness - Understand why you’re attracted to someone opposite -- without pathologizing it
The initial attraction in the anxious-avoidant pairing is genuine; understanding what drove it prevents repetition.
The Anxious-Avoidant Trap: Why Opposites Attract and Then Struggle - Pursue preferred indifferents without requiring them
Prefer health, success, and good relationships — but pursue them as means, not as conditions of your well-being.
The Stoic Discipline of Action - Track your desires and their outcomes over time
Log what you wanted this week, whether you got it, and whether getting it produced what you expected.
The Stoic Discipline of Desire
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m busy chasing things but half of them feel like what I’m supposed to want, not what I actually do
- I keep chasing my own happiness head-on and it keeps slipping away
- Every time I pick one thing I ache about all the paths I’m closing off, and I keep half-committing to leave my options open
- I keep chasing the number
- I’ve pinned myself to this exact target
Related concerns
- When Self Transcendence Maslow Being Values B Values
Attend to and create more encounters with what Maslow called the Being-Values — qualities of existence rather than means to ends.
Cultivate B-Values: truth, beauty, goodness, and wholeness
- Im Chasing This Because I Feel Like Im Supposed To
Look for where your effort visibly helps someone, not just where it pleases you.
The contribution test (what the world needs)
- Desire Examination Practice
Pierre Hadot identified the "discipline of desire" as one of the three Stoic spiritual exercises: training yourself to desire only what is in your power (virtue, your own judgments and responses) and to be indifferent to what is not. The practice targets the root cause of most human suffering — craving things outside your control — rather than its symptoms.
- Desire Management Philosophy
Pierre Hadot identified the "discipline of desire" as one of the three Stoic spiritual exercises: training yourself to desire only what is in your power (virtue, your own judgments and responses) and to be indifferent to what is not. The practice targets the root cause of most human suffering — craving things outside your control — rather than its symptoms.
- Disciplines Of Desire
Pierre Hadot identified the "discipline of desire" as one of the three Stoic spiritual exercises: training yourself to desire only what is in your power (virtue, your own judgments and responses) and to be indifferent to what is not. The practice targets the root cause of most human suffering — craving things outside your control — rather than its symptoms.
- Epicurean Desire Reality Check
Before pursuing a desire, classify it: is it natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary, or vain?
Classifying desires before pursuing them
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.