Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Core Desired Feelings
Discover how you most want to feel across the key areas of your life and distill it to a few ‘core desired feelings’ that become your compass.
In 4 lines: Go area by area through your life (work, body, relationships, creativity, spirit) and free-write how you want to feel. Dig past generic words to what’s underneath. Narrow it to 3–5 “core desired feelings.” Declare them — that small set is now your compass.
What it is
This is Danielle LaPorte’s foundational practice in The Desire Map, and everything else in her method depends on it. The premise is an inversion of ordinary goal culture: you are not actually chasing your goals — you are chasing the way you hope reaching them will make you feel.
So before setting any goal, you do the deeper work first: you find out how you most want to feel, name it honestly, and distill it down to a handful of words LaPorte calls your “core desired feelings.” Those few words then act as a compass for the rest of your planning and decisions.
It is, in plain terms, a feelings-centered values-clarification exercise — turning attention inward to surface what you actually want to experience (The Inner Creates the Outer: who you are/want to be precedes what you go after; The Inner Creates the Outer: the felt state, not the abstract goal, is what’s really driving you).
The Method
A faithful rendering of LaPorte’s published process:
- Survey the key areas of your life. LaPorte invites you to reflect, area by area, on how you want to feel. She groups life into domains such as livelihood & lifestyle, body & wellness, creativity & learning, relationships & society, and essence & spirituality. Go through each and ask: how do I want to feel here?
- Free-write without editing. Pour out feeling-words for each area in a stream of consciousness — “how do I want to feel” — holding nothing back and not yet judging the words.
- Look beneath the obvious words. Push past generic, results-flavored words like successful, productive, or happy. Ask what’s underneath them — the actual felt quality you’re after. (LaPorte’s instruction is to “dig deeper” until you reach a word that lands in the body, not the head.)
- Narrow to a few. Cross off the feelings that don’t truly resonate and cluster the ones that do, reducing the list to roughly three to five core desired feelings — the small set that, if you felt them regularly, would mean your life is working.
- Declare them. Write them down plainly and own them. LaPorte notes this clarification “may take days, or it may take years” — the first pass is a draft, not a verdict; let the words refine over time. (Sourcing note: the life domains, the free-write, the “dig deeper / avoid generic words,” the reduction to a few, and the declaration are LaPorte’s published teaching, attributed and paraphrased; “core desired feelings” and “goals with soul” are her terms.)
Source & Lineage
Danielle LaPorte (b. 1969) introduced Core Desired Feelings in The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul (Sounds True, 2012; expanded 2014), which became a planner system, an app, and a licensed-facilitator workshop program.
The practice secularizes the New Thought intuition that feeling is the operative force (Neville Goddard, Lynn Grabhorn, the Hicks/Abraham “emotional guidance” idea) and recasts it as a coaching-style values-clarification tool, kin to “what matters most” reflections and to appreciative inquiry.
Common refinements
Stopping at generic words. Happy, successful, free are usually covers for something more specific. Keep asking “and what does that feel like underneath?”
- Treating it as one-and-done. The first draft is a draft. LaPorte expects the words to refine over weeks or years; revisit them.
- Picking aspirational-sounding words you don’t feel. Choose words that actually land in the body, not ones that look good on a vision board.
- Mistaking clarity for completion. Knowing how you want to feel is the setup for action (see the companion “Goals with Soul” practice), not a substitute for it.
- Outsourcing the feeling. Core desired feelings are states you generate within yourself, not feelings you demand others produce for you.