Dear Coach,

For a long time, I have been struggling to become clear on what I really want in life.

Lately, this issue has come up around the question of where my husband and I are living. At the moment we live in the middle of a city in an apartment in a working class neighborhood and have enjoyed all the amenities of city life including short commutes to work and all our friends living nearby as well.

However, since the birth of our daughter 11 months ago, I have become uncertain if our current neighborhood is a place where I want to raise my kid. At about the same time, my parents started suggesting to us to move out of the city to the town where I grew up and they still live – it is a beautiful town with a lake, lots of nature, very upper class and a 30 min commute into the city where we live now. I had a wonderful childhood there. My husband first agreed to move there for my sake but has since changed his mind saying that he does not want to do anything just for my sake that he is not comfortable with doing and that he is content living where we are now. I have at first accepted his decision.  However two days ago the possibility has come up to buy a house on my parents´ street and my parents have offered to buy the house for us if we would like to move there (my husband and I are not able to afford it ourselves).

Now I feel torn between what my husband wants (continue to live in the city), what my parents want (us moving next door to them), what I feel would be the best decision for our daughter (have her grow up surrounded by beautiful nature as I did). I took this situation to a 1 on 1-coaching session and the coach told me that I needed to find out what it is that I personally want independent of all the others – however that is exactly the problem, I cannot answer this question and don’t know how to go about finding out what it is that I really want.

I guess part of the problem is that since doing the LCS self coaching work, I know that my happiness in life does not depend on my outer circumstances such as where I live but on my thoughts and feelings about my outer circumstances, so in a strange way, I feel that this thought work has led to me being even less certain about what I really want as none of what I could be wanting is going to be determining my happiness, so it does not matter what I decide – e.g. the question whether or not to buy/move into this house now seems to be not so much a thing that I have to take a decision on since I can be equally happy living in the city or out of the city, but more of a question of who do I side with against the other party, my husband or my parents (it would obviously be my husband since I prioritize a happy, conflict-free marriage over living next door to my parents).

Please help! Thank you