The desire to achieve a result can be what becomes the obstacle to achieving it.

Among many other things that come along with that desire is an idea of how that desire should be achieved. It’s a plan that is based on one’s experience and on the image of the relationship people want to have with others.

Experience is a description of what people see as a way that works or is supposed to work. It’s a way that worked for them in the past and an assumption that it will do so in the future.

The relationship people want to have with others involves the idea of who has the power to make the plan happen.

Take for example a team that contributes regularly to a newsletter. The team will have one person that collects all the data from others, writes the newsletter, and sends it. That person has an idea of what she wants the newsletter to look like and how much content it should include. She also has an idea of how important it is for her to include data from all the contributors who are invited to provide their part.

The challenge she encounters here is to deal with the uncertainty that results from her interdependence with others as well as her desire to deliver the best possible newsletter.

Or said differently, the challenge lies with her definition of a good enough newsletter.

There are at least two choices she has to make. One is how dependent she will make herself from receiving all the input she wanted to include. The other is how safe she is with the idea to make a decision others may not appreciate. The first question is focused on the quality she wanted to achieve, whereas the second is linked to everyone’s wellbeing in their relationship.

As long as she doesn’t make herself aware, that these can be choices, the risk is to remain subject to the idea that there is a way of how things should be.

The desire that things should be as one hoped for has suddenly become the limitation with which one operates.

It’s when the desire to stick to how things should be won over the appreciation of how things are.