I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

How can you uncover the life you were meant to live beneath all the expectations others placed on you? In Wishcraft, Barbara Sher argues that most people don’t suffer from a lack of talent but from internalized prohibitions—voices that say, “You’re supposed to be X.” Her central thesis: every person carries buried desires and unique gifts, but family, culture, fear, and habit distort them. The path to authentic success isn’t chasing miracles; it’s designing a reality that fits who you truly are.

Sher’s method is both psychological and practical. She combines emotional excavation with experiments in action. You begin by questioning the messages you absorbed, then you test possibilities through small steps, expose resistance, and use community support to build a new life. Her approach works like behavioral engineering for dreams—structured, compassionate, and humorous.

Unmasking the "Supposed‑To" Messages

You were trained by parents, teachers, and peers to pursue “good” goals—doctor, perfect mother, quiet achiever—but those may not fit you. Many readers like Jack M. or Benita B. discovered they lived inside invisible scripts: career paths and personal roles inherited from others. Sher’s antidote is awareness. List everyone who influenced you and what they wanted. You’ll notice absurd patterns, like George J., who married an opera singer because his father loved opera. Awareness doesn’t dishonor loved ones—it separates love from obedience.

Taking Action to Find Luck

Action isn’t a risk; it’s discovery. Sher contends that clarity comes from motion. Jessie, who impulsively joined a dog-sled race, found joy and closure through participation—not contemplation. The act itself was data, not a commitment to permanent change. You get lucky when you engage the world. Four dynamics make it work: action clarifies thought, boosts self‑esteem, attracts opportunity, and hones instinct. (Note: This echoes ideas from Kurt Lewin’s field theory—learning emerges through movement and feedback.)

Making Resistance Speak

As soon as you act, resistance appears. Sher teaches you to provoke it deliberately. Take a temporary goal and watch fears surface. For example, Louisa tried a “Job from Heaven” exercise and phoned the Post Office—her resistance roared awake. By naming those inner protests (“You’ll embarrass yourself!”), you expose protective scripts rooted in childhood. Once visible, you can reason with them or design decoys that let you proceed despite them.

Separating Escape from Real Dreams

Many people confuse fantasy with desire. Sher distinguishes escape dreams—being a rock star—from real dreams—the enduring call to write, heal, or create. Escape fantasies mask missing emotions: freedom, self‑respect, serenity. Translating them into tangible needs turns restlessness into momentum. You then take “micro‑risks”—tiny actions that retrain your alarm system to operate under adventure rather than anxiety.

Facing Fear of Success

The paradox of Sher’s work is that success itself frightens many. You start thriving, then sabotage it. By mapping the chronology of self‑defeating moments—like Marcia’s sudden voice loss before performances—you uncover recurring emotional logic: fear of envy, loss of love, or guilt for surpassing parents. Two exercises help: let the “antisuccess” voice speak freely, then ask “Who says?” When you identify the source (parent, culture), you can rewrite the story and grieve unfulfilled love without repeating its pattern.

Claiming Your Voice and Escaping the Tribe

The tribe teaches belonging, but belonging may conflict with selfhood. Many like Marnie lived half‑lives because tribal rules mocked their real gifts. Through written debates between “Personal Voice” and “Tribal Voice,” you carve out your own position. Then you design a “Perfect Family”—a reimagined context that supports you emotionally. Finally, you seek your new tribe by immersion: go where your interests dwell. Finding allies replaces psychological exile with social validation.

Trial Jobs and Learning From the “Wrong” Paths

Sher reframes early or imperfect jobs as trial marriages. You learn by doing, not waiting for ideal alignment. Barb discovered in a factory fantasy that she valued mastery and order—insights she carried forward. Treat each experience as data collection and practice autonomy while working for others. Her exercises—including the Ninety‑Five‑Year Plan—recover perspective, proving failure is just a chapter in a ninety‑five‑year story.

Regrouping After Change or Loss

When life shifts—layoff, divorce, children leaving—you regroup by emotion first, strategy second. Sher’s “touchstone” method uses memories and fantasies to reveal your core desire—the delicious essence that survives every upheaval. Then you prototype new futures through small experiments with friends. (Her Success Teams mirror social learning models in modern coaching.)

Recovering When Luck Turns Rotten

External tragedy—illness, failure—requires grief, not slogans. Sher teaches deliberate mourning, praising lost worlds, and crafting new identities that carry forward their meaning. Bill, who lost his baseball dream, unearthed his touchstones—mastery and outdoors—and built photography around them. The task is not replacement but integration.

Reawakening Desire and Calming Rage

Chronic negativity and raging perfectionism are twin shadows. If you feel nothing interests you, diagnose physical causes, move, and start small projects. Trace the childhood moment that killed curiosity and praise the part that survived it. Ragers, on the other hand, want glory without groundwork. Their cure is humility and service—teaching kids, building soup kitchens, mastering craft. The ordinary becomes the true route to extraordinary fulfillment.

Love, Distraction, and Honest Priorities

Finally, Sher warns against red herrings—displaced desires, often love. If your real need is affection, admit it instead of hiding behind career confusion. Then plan a campaign with friends and act boldly. Even if the love fails, the act of living honestly and fully makes you capable of new creation. Her closing philosophy: clarity and connection draw success; disguise and withdrawal repel it. The path to freedom is naming what you want and giving yourself permission to pursue it.

Sher begins with the concept of Supposed‑To messages—instructions carved into your mind before you knew choice existed. They whisper that you must be sensible, modest, or sacrificial. You enact these inherited blueprints until life feels smaller than you imagined. Jack M. chased medicine because his parents admired doctors; Benita B. measured worth by others' success. Such scripts are invisible fences.

Drawing Out the Voices

Write down what each influential person wanted from you. Don’t worry about accuracy—perception shapes psychology more than fact. George J. thought opera would please his father and built a life around that false intuition. Naming these messages transforms guilt into observation. Then make the absurd collage of expectations—your family’s impossible child—to visually dismantle their authority. The absurdity lets humor replace shame.

Love vs. Respect

A core insight: love fuses, respect differentiates. Parents often love but don’t convey respect for individuality. You may confuse devotion with obligation. Recognizing that difference frees you from the compulsion to perform for approval.

Activating Self-Authority

Every time an inner prohibition rises (“That’s not practical”), ask Who says? Let the question act as mental solvent. As the false author disappears, you begin acting from curiosity rather than compliance—setting the first foundation for your real dreams.

Once you’ve glimpsed freedom, the next challenge is motion. Sher’s rule: Do something small right now. Action creates luck because it multiplies encounters, feedback, and confidence. Jessie’s dog-sled adventure illustrates it perfectly. She didn’t foresee a life-plan in racing; she simply tested desire and learned. She returned with knowledge, not regret.

The Four Engines of Action

• Action clarifies thought: experience beats reasoning; doing compresses learning.
• Action rebuilds self‑esteem: courage multiplies identity faster than analysis.
• Action invites luck: movement draws resources and people.
• Action tunes instincts: repetition teaches boundaries that intellect can’t.

Acting “As If”

For fear-bound people, “Act as if” is a magic phrase. Ex‑addicts practiced dignity through uniforms and punctuality until inner respect followed. Pretend competence, and competence arrives. (Note: Cognitive-behavioral models later validated this principle in exposure therapy.)

Momentum Over Perfection

Don’t wait for clarity before moving; movement generates clarity. Each experiment, call, or class is a pebble thrown into the universe—ripples return information. Inactivity preserves confusion; activity dissolves it. Your task is not prediction but participation.

When progress falters, Sher insists you treat resistance not as an enemy but as an informant. Emotions obstruct action for protective reasons. Instead of arguing, you make them speak.

Provoking the Protective System

Set a short-term commitment—a “Temporary Permanent” hour—and behave as if it’s final. The alarmed part of your psyche will protest. Note every objection. Louisa, trying an imagined postal career, felt shame and burnout minutes in. Once named, each fear—poverty, ridicule, loss—becomes negotiable truth instead of invisible sabotage.

Refining Preferences

Exercises like “Job from Hell” and its inversion help clarify desires through contrast. Hatred is diagnostic. Turning what you despise into its opposite builds a concrete sketch of what works for you. When resistance objects, reply: “Thank you for protecting me; now let’s rewrite your job description.” That dialogue converts paralysis into design.

The Negotiation Mindset

You can’t kill resistance; you collaborate with it. Your protective system wants safety. Offer it safety through small steps, allies, and rehearsals. Then the guard becomes a guide.

Sher’s midbook turn distinguishes escape fantasies from authentic dreams. The difference lies in commitment. The first numbs you with impossible thrills; the second challenges and sustains you through growth.

Finding the Real Dream

Write down your glamour dreams—piloting jets, stardom—and decode their emotional meaning. Joe’s fighter fantasy meant a hunger for freedom, not aviation. Translate the feeling into feasible goals. Adventure doesn’t mean risk; it means vitality.

Courage Gradients

If your safety instinct dominates, train it with micro‑risks: spontaneous choices, small trips, minor confrontations. Judy, raised to fear the world, learned courage through vanilla ice cream and weekend calls before large ventures. Courage grows like muscle—through incremental weight.

Balancing Love and Boundaries

Replace habitual caretaking with structured self‑time: the Love Showdown exercise teaches that giving yourself thirty minutes daily isn’t selfish but necessary. Real dreams survive guilt only when love includes respect for autonomy.

Progress may awaken panic. Many retreat at the brink of achievement. Sher’s cure is to expose and re-script the fear directly.

Two Voices

Let your success voice and antisuccess voice debate. “I want recognition” vs. “That’s selfish.” Writing both unmasks ancestral beliefs. Andrea discovered her mother’s label for successful women as vain; Saul saw his father’s pride as theft. Identifying the voice’s source disarms it.

Rewriting the Past

Write letters to figures who didn’t love you right, or replay the moment of surrender—this time you act differently. Greif and anger drain the emotional voltage feeding sabotage. Success becomes permissible.

Small Maintenance Rituals

Use buddy systems, guilt decoys, or “complain while you work.” Accept fear as a background noise, not a stop signal. Over time, its intensity fades—proof that emotional rewiring works through repetition.

True success requires audience and allies. Sher’s “Ugly Duckling” section shows that rejection often signals misplaced environment, not failure of merit. Like Marnie, the intellectual born to bar owners, you may be a swan in a duckyard.

Debating Internal Voices

Write dialogs between Personal and Tribal perspectives. The tribe says, “Fashion is vanity”; you answer, “Fashion dignifies self‑image.” Seeing both in print distinguishes internalized criticism from authentic principle.

Imagining Supportive Families

Construct two ideal families: one famous that applauds your values (Curie, Proust), and one real family reimagined as kind. This symbolic ritual heals guilt and permits departure without rage.

Building a New Tribe

Go where your kind gather and speak your passion audibly. Your environment teaches identity faster than self‑talk. Once you stand among allies, the tribal voice quiets naturally.

Early jobs and midlife shifts both invite learning-by-doing. Sher treats transitions as laboratories. When you see work as a trial marriage, you lose the terror of choosing perfectly.

Trial Marriages

Take wrong jobs intentionally. Barb’s fantasy as a tractor-factory supervisor revealed that she adored management and protection—data for later choices. Each workplace becomes an apprenticeship: gather contacts, inventory skills, record observations. Never let a job define identity; it’s a classroom.

Second Acts

After loss or drastic change, regroup through touchstones—themes that recur across your joys. Norman traced his delight in cultural immersion and designed a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fantasy or memory exercises reveal those motifs. Build new ventures around them rather than old forms.

Networking and Prototyping

Join Success Teams; cooperate through low‑cost prototypes. Regrouping depends on curiosity and comradeship—the twin fuels of reinvention.

Some losses exceed motivation; they demand mourning. Sher’s chapter on rotten luck restores dignity to pain. When illness or displacement erase your dream, you must grieve it fully.

Grieving and Praising

Rant until you bore yourself; then list beloved moments of the vanished life. Praise transforms grief into legacy. Bill’s memories of ballparks became seeds for his new creative work.

Forgiving the Present

Write a forgiveness letter to your current reality. Treat today as raft, not tomb. From acceptance grows invention; resentment wastes energy.

Reclaiming Desire

If nothing interests you, test physical causes (sleep, light), move your body, and start tiny projects. Then trace emotional roots of desire-killing events and thank the child who survived them. Gradual curiosity returns like sap after winter.

Transforming Rage

If you rage for recognition, redirect it into consistent work and altruism. Sylvia’s rescue of her father’s hardware store shattered her fantasy and built resilience. Ordinary service heals the extraordinary wound.

Sher closes with a gentle provocation: sometimes what obstructs career clarity is a disguised love story. You may seek vocational answers to emotional questions. The cure is authenticity.

Admitting Real Priorities

Lee wanted career guidance but actually missed Steve. Instead of denying romantic need, Sher told her to pursue it outright. Honesty restores coherence. Write what you want and display it without shame.

Transforming Hopelessness Into Play

List “Twenty Reasons There’s No Hope,” exhaust despair, then brainstorm wild solutions in an Idea Storm with friends. Collective creativity reframes pain into campaign planning. Love and work can coexist as twin projects, reducing obsession and broadening vitality.

The Noble Win

Even failed outcomes dignify the self. To act wholeheartedly clarifies identity. The final message: authenticity, community, and patient action make both affection and success ordinary miracles.