What to do when you don’t know what to do next
Why is it so hard to know what to do next?
Making good decisions and choices is hard.
Whatever your age, the stakes feel high.
Fear of making a mistake can take over, making you less ambitious and less bold.
Part of the problem is that everyone has an opinion: you feel bombarded with information, advice and opinions. All of it well-intentioned.
But as one client said,
“My head is full of other people’s voices.”
When you don’t know what to do next, you must make sure you bring in the top expert.
You.
This shifts control back to you and stops you feeling overwhelmed by other people’s fears and expectations.
Lots of people I work with talk about feeling stuck:
Concrete
Granite
Mud.
They feel stupid, as if they’re not trying hard enough.
Their confidence crashes.
They feel as if they’ve lost control of the situation.
They’re haunted by what ifs and fear of failure.
When you feel like that, the pressure to know what you want, and to have a plan, keeps you awake at night.
That’s when you need to start tuning in to you.
Step 1: Gather the evidence about yourself
Before we’ve even left school we’ve absorbed a surprising amount of misleading and unhelpful information about ourselves.
The older we are, the more we’ve accumulated.
We’ve been told what we’re good at and not good at.
Numbers and letters have been officially and permanently attached to our names.
We’ve also had our characters thoroughly judged and reported, for better or worse. So we are officially lazy, not a team player, trying hard, often late, disruptive, creative – or not.
We’ve been drowned in ‘shoulds’:
You should go to university if you can
You should be ambitious
You should do something that leads to a good job
You should make the most of your potential and your education
You should always take the promotion
You should be independent and leave home like your friends have
You should follow your passion and make sensible financial choices
You should do what’s best for your family
Above all, you should know what you want to do.
Those labels and ‘shoulds’ can be hard to shake. Our inner critics and judges take over.
That doesn’t make for good decisions.
Step 2: Fill in the gaps
Relationship turmoil never hits the record; nor do the deaths of family members or pets. Nobody may ever know how hard you tried, or that someone else took your textbook or MacBook, so you couldn’t prepare.
Or that you had terrible period pain or hay fever or a financial crisis while you were sitting exams or having an appraisal.
You may be very good at things that aren’t being recorded:
Making people feel listened to
Supporting your colleagues
Designing video games
Spotting mistakes
Working with animals
Innovating.
You may not write these things on your application, but they’re part of your story. You need to take them into account if you’re going to represent yourself accurately.
Step 3: Test the evidence
You can start by looking at the story you tell yourself about yourself and asking whether that story is true.
For example: are you actually not very clever?
Do you really never have good ideas?
Do you truly think you couldn’t do that better?
Do you feel “good at Maths”?
Or did you scrape by through hours of extra work and tutoring and actually hate Maths and never want to have to think about it again?
Are you a natural leader?
Or do you find being a senior leader incredibly stressful and would love nothing better than to step down, take the pay cut and enjoy your weekends again.
Do you really love Languages but had terrible teachers and got very anxious so you messed up your exams?
Are you actually creative, just not on Wednesday mornings in the school Art Room when someone else is telling you what to do?
Step 4: Find yourself a notebook and pen
We all have a conversation going on with ourselves, inside ourselves, but we’re given no time or tools to help us hear it.
Sometimes the volume goes up – usually with the voice of our inner critic or feelings of being an imposter (that’s our protectors overworking).
Sometimes we might find ourselves saying, “Part of me wants to do that, but part of me doesn’t.”
Writing is the ideal way to start tuning in to that conversation.
What are the voices you’re hearing in your head – and what are they saying?
How do they make you feel?
Are they right? (Look at the evidence!)
Here are a few questions you might ask yourself – or even better, ask someone to ask you. I would write down the answers – but expect them to change. It’s all useful data.
Who are you?
Who are you?
Who are you?
Who do you admire and why?
What would you like to be recognised for?
How would you like to spend your days?
What sort of shoes would you like to wear?
Who has a job you’d love to have?
What’s the dream?
What is the one thing that people always get wrong about you?
Try this:
Choose one thing you believe about yourself.
Write down where that belief came from.
What evidence supports it and what evidence might complicate it.
What’s missing?
If you work with me, I’ll give you my guide to keeping a notebook – it’s called The Other Bird.
If you're a young person trying to work out what you want to do next, The Missing Subject is where we explore these questions together.
What changes when you know who you are and you can put that into words?
When you start to explore who you are and begin putting that into words, the language you use to describe yourself becomes more and more yours.
You start to stand out.
You become memorable.
It becomes easier to show how you’re a great fit for an opportunity and why they should give it to you – and nobody else.
It gives you the language to talk about what you care about, your values and your purpose.
All that evidence and clarity gives you the confidence to be ambitious and take risks.
So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do next?
Start with you.
Look at what you believe about yourself. Ask where those beliefs came from, what they’re based on, and what might be missing.
Test the evidence.
Start a writing habit to help yourself tune in to your own voice. If writing feels weird do mindmaps or doodle – but make a note of your thoughts.
They are the thoughts of an expert.
You don’t need to have all the answers. You need to start a conversation with yourself, about yourself.
That’s when you’ll start to know for sure what it is you want to do next.
If you're an adult who feels stuck and wants to make different choices, The Shortest Path offers a space to explore who you are and what you want to do next.
I’m Annabel Smith, an experienced personal decision coach based in the UK helping adults and young people who don’t know what to do next - to work out who they are, what they care about and build a life that’s unmistakably theirs.
Book an introductory call.
