Before You Decide Where You're Going, Understand Where You Are
I have an appalling sense of direction. Always have had. It's something my friends know about me, and over the years it's led to some fairly ridiculous situations, although they haven't always felt particularly funny at the time.
One of those occasions was in Madeira.
I was staying in Funchal and had gone walking along one of the island's levadas, the narrow irrigation channels that wind their way through the mountains. They're beautiful places to walk, with extraordinary views, lush vegetation and stretches of pathway that take you along the sides of mountains.
At some point during my walk, I realised I had absolutely no idea where I was.
There I was, somewhere on the side of a mountain, surrounded by beautiful scenery, with no real sense of where I was in relation to where I'd started or where I needed to go.
I did what any sensible person with a terrible sense of direction might do. I got out my phone, contacted a good friend on Facebook and sent her a photograph of where I was standing, accompanied by a message along the lines of, "Just in case you never find me, here's where I am."
She thought it was hilarious. She knew me well enough to appreciate the situation I'd managed to get myself into.
I can laugh about it now, too.
But I've been thinking about that little episode again recently, particularly the instinct that made me reach for my phone and send that photograph. I didn't know where I was going to go next. I didn't even know quite where I was. But I wanted somebody, somewhere, to have some idea of my location. And the more I think about it, the more I realise how much that experience has in common with the way we sometimes find ourselves navigating our working lives.
When something no longer feels quite right
There are points in our careers and lives when we become aware that something has changed, even when we can't necessarily explain what it is.
We might still be doing work we're good at, in a role we worked hard to achieve, surrounded by people and circumstances that once made complete sense to us. and from the outside, very little seems to have changed.
But our experience of it has.
The work used to energise us feels different. The ambitions that once motivated us stop having the same meaning. Things we were prepared to accommodate have become harder to accept, while things we barely noticed before have started to matter enormously.
We feel the discomfort before we understand where its coming from, and because we want to resolve that discomfort, we begin looking for answers.
Should I change jobs? Do I need a different career? Is it time to leave leadership? Have I lost my ambition? What should I do next?
They're understandable questions.
I've explored the pressure to know what's next before, and how easily that pressure can crowd out the curiosity we need to understand what we're experiencing.
But there's another question I think we should maybe focus on first before we rush to an answer.
Where am I now?
Not where I expected to be, where I think I should be, or where somebody else thinks I ought to have arrived by this point in my life.
Where am I, as the person I am today, in the circumstances I'm actually living and working in today?
The landscape doesn't stand still
I've come to think of our careers and lives as landscapes that we are continually moving through.
Some parts are familiar. We know the paths, understand the terrain and have a reasonable idea of what lies ahead. Other parts are less predictable. The ground changes, the weather closes in, an opening appears where there wasn't one before, or a route we've followed for years becomes difficult to navigate.
But there's something else about this landscape that matters.
It doesn't remain unchanged while we move through it. And neither do we.
Organisations change. Industries change. Relationships and responsibilities change. Our health, our circumstances and the demands on our time and energy change.
And we change, too.
We develop different perspectives. We discover things about ourselves that we couldn't have understood earlier in our lives. Our priorities change, our ambitions evolve, and our lived experiences alter what we're prepared to give our time and energy to.
Which means that our relationship with the landscape is continually changing, even when we seem to be standing in exactly the same place.
You can remain in the same organisation, doing the same work, and find that your experience of it has changed profoundly. Equally, you can move into a new role or environment and discover that the change of scenery hasn't resolved what was troubling you. Because changing where you are doesn't automatically change your relationship with yourself, your work or your life.
And staying where you are doesn't mean that nothing has changed.
Arriving where you intended to go
There's a disorientation that comes from arriving at somewhere you once wanted to be, only to find that it no longer feels the way you imagined it would be.
You worked hard to get there.
You made decisions, accepted compromises, developed your expertise and built a career around things that mattered to you. And those decisions may have been entirely right for the person you were when you made them.
But years have passed. You've lived more life. You've experienced things you couldn't have anticipated, and you've learned things about yourself that you didn't know then.
The destination hasn't necessarily changed.
The person who arrived there has.
That's why I don't believe we should treat our earlier career decisions as permanent commitments to the people we used to be. Because we made those decisions with the understanding, priorities and circumstances we had at the time. Realising that something no longer fits doesn't invalidate the choices that brought us there, nor does it mean that everything we've built has been a mistake.
This is part of what I've been exploring through congruence - the relationship between who we are, what matters to us and the lives we're actually living.
It just means we're still living, learning and changing, and that deserves our curiosity not our judgement. Because you can arrive exactly where you intended to go and still find yourself somewhere you no longer want to be.
Where you are now is not who you are permanently
One of the problems with feeling unsettled in our working lives is how quickly we begin turning a current experience into a statement about who we are.
I'm stuck.
I've lost my confidence.
I don't know what I want anymore.
I've become someone who can't make decisions.
We take something we're experiencing at a specific point in time and begin treating it as though it defines us.
But there's a difference between recognising where you are and deciding that where you are is who you've become.
You might be exhausted because of what you've been carrying.
You might be uncertain because the circumstances around you have changed.
You might be questioning your ambitions because your understanding of success has evolved.
None of those experiences is a permanent identity.
And as I explored in Energy: The Resource That Makes Change Possible, our capacity affects not only what we can do, but how we think about the choices in front of us.
They're just information about the relationship between you and your life as it is now, and that distinction matters because it changes the way we approach what comes next.
So instead of demanding an immediate answer to the question of what we should do, we can begin by understanding what we're actually experiencing.
What has changed around me?
What has changed in me?
What am I still carrying that no longer belongs in the life I'm living?
What matters to me now that didn't matter in quite the same way before?
And what do I have available to me, in terms of choices, influence and energy, to respond to what I'm discovering?
Those questions don't require us to abandon everything or make a dramatic change.
They simply help us to understand the ground we're standing on.
Taking our bearings before choosing a direction
A compass doesn't decide where you should go.
It helps you understand your position and orient yourself in relation to the world around you.
That's the thinking behind the Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass, which I've begun introducing in the podcast.
It brings together four aspects of our experience - Identity, Environment, Agency and Energy - to help us take a snapshot of where we are in our careers and lives at a particular point in time.
Not to label us, tell us what career we should pursue, and certainly not to suggest that one assessment could tell us who we are for the rest of our lives.
Its purpose is to give us somewhere to begin.
Because understanding where we are is different from deciding where we need to go.
The relationship between who we are, the circumstances around us, the choices available to us and the energy we have to act on those choices is rarely straightforward. We don't experience our lives in neat compartments. We experience them as a whole, and that's why I think taking our bearings matters.
It gives us an opportunity to look at the whole picture before deciding which part of that picture needs our attention.
You don't have to know where you're going yet
I sometimes wonder how much unnecessary pressure we put on ourselves by believing that recognising something needs to change means we should already know what to do about it.
We notice that something feels different, and immediately demand a plan.
We feel unsettled, and assume the answer must be a decision.
We question a career we've spent years building, and expect ourselves to know what should replace it.
But recognising that something has changed and understanding what that change means are two different things.
And between them lies a space worth giving ourselves permission to occupy for a time.
A space for noticing, reflecting and becoming curious about the lives we're actually living, rather than the lives we thought we'd be living by now.
When I think back to that walk in Madeira, I still smile at the photograph I sent my friend from the mountainside.
I hadn't worked out where I was going next. I was just trying to establish where I was.
And while I wouldn't recommend my approach to mountain navigation, I think there's something here worth carrying into our working lives.
You don't have to know where you're going
before you can begin understanding where you are.
Beacuse sometimes, that's precisely where the work begins.
Listen to the podcast
In Episode 34 of Proactive Empowered Careers®, I introduce the thinking behind the Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass and explore why taking our bearings matters when the relationship between ourselves, our careers and our lives begins to change.
🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️
Continue exploring
If this piece has made you think differently about what is happening beneath your career questions, you might also want to explore:
When your life is demanding more than you have available, finding clarity becomes harder. Explore why making space to think matters before asking yourself to make important decisions.
Clarity: Seeing Yourself More Clealry (Episode 26)
Understanding what you want next begins with understanding who you are now, including the ways your experiences, priorities and perspective have changed.
Choice: Recognising Your Agency (Episode 29)
Having choices and having the capacity to act on them are not the same thing. Explore what it means to recognise your agency and begin seeing where choice still exists.
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