Clarity at the Crossroads
I'm seeing a pattern in the conversations I've been having these last few weeks.
"Part of me wants to rekindle my passion for my work and part of me wants to find a new challenge."
"I'm really trying to discover who I am and it's been a difficult search."
"I feel like I'm standing at a crossroads and don't know which way to go."
"I just lost the thing that brought meaning to my life and now I don't feel like I belong anywhere."
I see myself in each of these. If you feel this way, you're not alone.
These statements underlie the big questions that come up in our lives and we can approach them with excitement and possibility or with dread and the fear that we'll make the wrong choice.
What's most important is that you make a choice. The worst thing we can do is pull up a chair in this intersection and say "If I can't figure it out, I'll do nothing at all."
Inaction is still action. But is it action that will move you closer to yourself?
I found myself at this exact spot in 2009. I grabbed my folding chair, set it up squarely in the middle of the street, and sat there uncomfortably, doubtingly, unmovingly for three years.
From the outside, my life was everything I wanted... everything other people longed for in their own lives. A great job. A nice income. Beautiful home. Perfect (ahem) family. People knew me. All the outward signs of a successful life.
But inside a war was raging. I was missing out on the life I was meant to live. As I told a friend this week, "I felt like I was a can of Diet Coke that had been furiously shaken but the top wasn't popped yet." And if I sat at this intersection of inaction any longer, I was going to explode.
Sitting in the waiting space will consume you.
Someone once told me that people don't need clarity, they need gumption. In a way, I believe that's true. There are times when our heart knows (and I mean really knows) what we want and it's our head that needs convincing. Yet, there are other times we do need to see more clearly, to ask the hard questions, to draw out our deepest desires first... and then we need gumption to turn it into action.
So how do we move off this indifference? How do we choose which way to go? How do we turn our inaction into purposeful action?
Tune into your heart.
Get quiet enough to hear what your heart is saying.
Draw it out and get it down on paper.
In The Great Work of Your Life, Stephen Cope says,
You can only expect a fulfilling life if you dedicate yourself to finding out who you are. To finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic seeds of possibility already planted inside. There is some surrender required here.
The surrender is laying down what your head is telling you, what the world is telling you, what your boss or your parents are telling you, and having the courage to discover what your life, your heart, your intuition, your soul is whispering to you.
I literally feel at a crossroads with this message. There are so many directions to take this... The original action-driven outcome for this piece was to invite you to find a moment to bring more clarity to all the thoughts swirling in your head. I wanted to encourage you to give yourself space to ask and answer some of the big questions keeping you at the crossroads in an organized way.
I wanted to share this resource with you...
It's one of the first resources I created (if you can't tell... 😁) but it's one of the most powerful, life-affirming, life-altering exercises I've ever completed. It is something I revisit every year.
And I want you to have it. Better yet... I want you to do it.
Steve Scanlon, a coach at Building Champions, said,
Writing a life plan is nothing short of getting a bucket and lowering it deep into the well of your heart and pulling out its life giving water.
Don't think of this as 'writing a life plan'... think of it as gaining clarity while you're at the crossroads.