What do people want?

It just happened today that I realised that two very different books I am reading / processing had two related insights.

From “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever” by Michael Bungay Stanier, talking about the question “What do you want?”: “Here’s why the question is so difficult to answer. We often don’t know what we actually want.”

Now, combine this with “And the Mountains Echoed” by Khaled Hosseini - “People mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”

What a day to find such related pearls of wisdom.