The Pressure to Know What Comes Next

Patricia Ezechie
Aug 12
7 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Text graphic reading: “Perhaps the problem is not that we do not yet have an answer. Perhaps we have not spent enough time with the question.” from Epsiode 25 or the Proactive Empowered Careers Podcast with Patricia Ezechie. — We often put ourselves under pressure to find career clarity before we have given ourselves enough space to understand what is changing.

One of the things I notice when people begin talking about being unhappy in their careers is how quickly they move from recognising that something is wrong to trying to work out what they are going to do about it.

They might have spent months, sometimes years, feeling tired, restless, bored, frustrated or simply aware that something just didn't fit anymore. And then, almost as soon as they finally say that out loud, the next thing they say is, “I just need to work out what I’m going to do next.”

And I understand that. Of course we want an answer. If something feels uncomfortable, particularly something as important as our work, we want to resolve it. We want to know what the right next move is, what we can afford to do, what would make the most sense, what would give us some security and alleviate the disatisfaction we are feeling. We want to feel that we are moving forward rather than simply sitting in uncertainty.

But I often wonder if we ask ourselves those questions too soon.

Because if you have only just begun to recognise that something in your career or life is changing, how could you possibly be expected to know immediately what the answer is?

You may not even understand what has changed yet. You may not know if you are tired of the work itself, the environment you are doing it in, the pace at which you are doing it, the role you have gradually taken on, or simply the version of yourself that has had to keep all of it going.

And yet we very quickly turn all of that complexity into one enormous question.

What next?

And maybe, that's where some of the pressure begins.

We become very practised at having to know

As we move through our lives, most of us become increasingly good at responding to what is required of us. We have work to do, bills to pay, people who rely on us, responsibilities we cannot simply put down just because we have started questioning our career.

We become capable.

We learn how to get things done.

We make decisions.

We solve problems.

And for many of us, that ability becomes such a normal part of who we are that we hardly notice ourselves doing it.

But I think something else can happen alongside that.

We become so accustomed to responding to the world around us that we stop asking ourselves what we are actually interested in.

Not what we should be interested in.

Not what would be useful, sensible, strategic or productive.

Just what catches our attention.

What makes us want to know more.

What we find ourselves thinking about when nobody has asked us to.

What makes us lean in.

And those are quite a different question. Beacuse if you have spent years being the person who knows, decides, manages, organises and gets on with things, being curious can almost feel unproductive. Beacuse it doesn't give you an immediate answer. It doesn't necessarily produce a plan. It simply leaves you with another question.

But maybe another question is exactly what is needed.

The questions we ask change what we are able to

notice

There is a very different feeling between asking yourself,

“What should I do?”

and asking,

“What am I interested in?”

The first question is already looking for an outcome. It wants a decision. The second is simply asking you to pay attention.

The same thing happens when we ask, “What is the safest option?”

instead of “What would I like to explore?”,

“What is the right answer?”

rather than “What might be possible for me now?”

There is nothing wrong with the practical questions, and at some point, they will matter enormously. Because careers exist inside real lives. We have financial commitments, families, health, responsibilities, geography, mortgages, pensions, all the ordinary realities that shape what is possible.

But practical questions and curious questions do different things.

One asks us to narrow. The other allows us, for a while, to widen. And if we narrow too quickly, we may end up trying to make a decision before we really know what we are deciding between. And this is one of the things I find most interesting about curiosity. It doesn't ask us to know. It allows us to explore before we know.

And that can take the pressure off. Beacuse instead of demanding that we solve the whole question of our future at once, we begin much more simply.

What am I noticing?

What am I drawn towards?

What am I wondering about?

What have I dismissed without really examining it?

Those are very different questions to live with for a time.

Some things are constraints. Some things are assumptions.

This is also where curiosity becomes useful in another way, because it helps us begin to separate what is genuinely fixed from what we have simply come to believe is fixed.

Those two things can look remarkably the same when we've been living with them for a long time.

There are real constraints.

If you need a certain income to support yourself or your family, that matters.

If you need flexibility because you care for someone, that matters.

If your health affects the kind of work you can sustainably do, that matters.

Curiosity is not about pretending those realities away. It's simply allows that even

alongside genuine constraints, there are often assumptions too keeping us stuck.

It's too late for me.

People like me don't do that.

I would have to start again.

Nobody would take me seriously.

I should be grateful for what I have.

I cannot possibly change now.

And sometimes we have been saying those things to ourselves for so long that they have stopped sounding like thoughts and started feeling like facts.

Curiosity gives us another way of meeting these contraints and assumptions.

Not by saying, “That is nonsense.”

Not by insisting that anything is possible.

But simply by asking, “Is that definitely true?”

And maybe even, “How do I know this?”

That may sound like a very small shift, but it can change the whole conversation.

Because a real constraint is something we need to work with, and an assumption is something we may need to question. And until we become curious, we won't know which we are dealing with.

Clarity comes after exploration, not before it

I think we have a strange expectation that clarity should come first.

That we should know what we want, and then go out and find it.

But that's not how it happens.

Sometimes we have a conversation with somebody and hear ourselves becoming animated about something we had barely thought about before.

Sometimes we read something and find ourselves coming back to it.

Sometimes somebody describes their work and we think, “That is interesting. I wonder what that would be like.”

Sometimes we try something new and realise we feel completely different doing it... in a good way. Beause small experiments can tell us things that thinking alone cannot.

Sometimes an idea keeps resurfacing, even though we keep pushing it away.

Individually, these moments can seem insignificant. But over time they begin to create a pattern. And that pattern tells us something.

It tells us where our attention is drawn to.

It tells us what feels energising.

It tells us what we might want to understand more about.

And that is why Curiosity sits where it does in the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method.

Connection comes first because we have to begin hearing ourselves again.

I explored that starting point more fully in Episode 24 of the Proactive Empowered Careers® podcast - The Starting Point for Real Change.

Then comes Curiosity, because once we are paying attention, we can begin to explore what we notice.

And only after that can Clarity begin to emerge.

Not dramatically, as one great moment when suddenly everything makes sense, but more gradually.

Through noticing.

Through conversations.

Through trying things.

Through allowing ourselves to follow an interest without immediately demanding to know where it's going to lead.

Maybe not knowing is not the problem

So, if you are questioning your career at the moment, you may still want an immediate answer. Most of us would.

But maybe you do not need to force one quite yet.

Maybe a more useful question, at least for now, is not,

“What am I going to do next?”

It may simply be,

“What am I curious about?”

What are you noticing?

What conversations are you drawn to?

What ideas keep coming back?

What makes you feel more interested, engaged, or perhaps even more like yourself?

You do not have to turn any of those things into a decision.

You do not have to know where they lead.

For now, you can simply let yourself notice them.

Because sometimes clarity does not begin with finding the answer.

It begins with allowing ourselves to become curious enough to discover what the question really is.

Listen to the Full Episode

This article was inspired by Episode 25 of the Proactive Empowered Careers® podcast.

In this episode I explore Curiosity as the second element of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, and why we often need to allow ourselves to explore before expecting ourselves to know what we need to do next.

🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️