I received a free copy from the publisher through Netgalley and voluntarily reviewed it.

This one caught my eye when I saw it on Netgalley and I decided to give it a try. I really liked the focus on figuring out what you want and what your desires are and especially the practical tips to do so. I liked the concrete tips and exercises the book provided to figure out what you wanted as well as tips to go from these ideas and thoughts to actually test whether these fit your life. It definitely made me think and reflect on my own life and I think this is a book I want to get back to again later and read again.

I liked the encouraging and positive hopeful tone of the book. I liked how it focuses on how following your desires can make your life richer. And how it goes against the prevailing idea that you should ignore your desires and why that isn't what the author recommends, but why she encourages you to listen to them. I enjoyed reading about the author's own experiencing and how focusing on her desires enriched her life.

While I enjoyed most parts, there were a few parts that didn't quite work for. And that's okay, with books like this I usually expect some parts to resonate more than others and that was the case here as well.

To summarize: I enjoyed this helpful and encouraging book about figuring out what your you want. I especially liked the practical tips and exercises the book provided. I also liked the positive and encouraging tone of the writing. It was great to read about the author's own experiencing with figuring out what she wanted and how that changed her life. There were a few parts of the book that didn't quite work for me, but I expect that from books like this that there are parts that don't resonate as well. All in all I can definitely recommend this book! It made me think and reflect on my own life and what I want and I hope to get back to it and read it again in the future.

I’m not a good goal-setter, but I loved this more holistic, desire-based approach to goal setting. I appreciated how the author incorporated a lot of inner work instead of simply addressing external goals and factors, and there was a lot of good reframing around common obstacles and negative self-talk. She delves deeply into the roots of desire and connects it in meaningful ways to living a life of authenticity that is aligned with your values.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for providing the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The Magic of Knowing What You Want is said to help you identify, clarify and embody your desires. However, rather early on in the book, there are questions about desires that required you to already know your desires without having them identified. So by the third of the book, I was waiting on proper prompts to help me find and understand my desires to go back to those questions but I never ended up going back.

There are affirmations and questions in different categories throughout, some will resonate while others will not. I did transfer some of these questions into my weekly reflections, so overall the questions are good but still far from helping me identify desires. It's not until later in the book where desire is broken down into more manageable pieces that I gleaned into identification and clarification.

Some but not all of the questions will have space where you can write down your answer, but if you consider this an exercise that you will want to come back to every so often, something the book lends itself towards, I do suggest a separate notebook as progress is easier to track.

The author does talk about micro-steps and included a few examples. Having already read Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits, I understood this a great deal but someone who is not familiar with those works or the science behind micro steps may find the idea absurd. I do wish the author would have dived more into this.

In the end, I do think the book can help if you use proper bookmarks and can flip back through the questions after having a better understanding of the content of the book. The writing style is more formal, like a friendly guide helping you wade through the waters, with plenty of stories and examples.