Feeling Stuck and Don’t Know What to Do Next? 5 Ways to Start
You know there’s something else. That might actually be the most frustrating part because if you were perfectly happy with your life as it is, perhaps you could settle into it. But instead you keep having ideas. You look at jobs you could do, courses you could take, places you could move to, things you could make or start or write. One day you think you’ve figured it out. By the next morning, you’re not so sure.
You talk yourself into something and then straight back out again. Underneath all those ideas is this restlessness, a feeling that you want more from your life, or perhaps simply something different from it, but you can’t work out what that something is. So you stay where you are.
This is the not particularly fun version of feeling lost. It doesn’t feel like freedom or possibility or a wide-open road. It feels constricting. Your world can start to feel smaller because you can’t work out how to make it bigger, and the longer you stay there, the more your confidence can disappear too.
Maybe you tell yourself you’ll make a decision when you’re more certain. You’ll start when you have more energy. You’ll apply when you feel more qualified. You’ll put the idea into the world when you believe in it — and yourself — a little more. Except the confidence doesn’t come, and without it, you don’t move.
I was thinking about all of this during my conversation with Victoria Phipps MBE on A Thought I Kept. Victoria describes emerging from COVID and the intense early years of motherhood feeling as though she had “fallen out of the world.” Before children, she had spent more than a decade running a charity with her father supporting Second World War veterans alongside a successful wedding photography business. Her life had felt big. She had felt capable. She had purpose and work she loved.
Then suddenly her life looked very different. She talks in our conversation about the “grief over my own capacity” — going from happily working a lot to finding that even sending an email could become a mission with two small children around her. But the ideas hadn’t disappeared. If anything, there were too many of them. Victoria estimates that she had over a thousand ideas about what she could do next.
This gets at something we don't always understand about feeling lost. You don't necessarily have no idea what you want. You can have far too many. So how do you start moving when you have all that restless energy but absolutely no idea where to put it?
1. Stop trying to find the thing
When you're lost, it's very easy to become obsessed with finding the answer. What should I do with my life? What's the right job? Which idea should I pursue? What am I meant to be doing? Victoria was asking versions of these questions too. She knew she couldn't simply return to the life she'd had before children, but she couldn't see what should replace it either.
Eventually, she stopped trying to recreate the thing and started thinking about the feelings underneath it. What had she loved about her old life? Connection. Community. Creativity. Conversation. Purpose. The feeling that how she was spending her time was making some kind of difference. She couldn't have her old life back, but perhaps those feelings could show up somewhere new.
I think that's such a useful place to start when you can't see a direction. Instead of asking yourself to name the job, business, project or life you want next, try asking what you want to feel more of. Perhaps you want to feel interested again. Useful. Connected. Creative. Free. Challenged. Calm. You still might not know what to do, but you've given yourself a direction to look in.
2. Follow the energy, even if you don't know what it means yet
There’s a moment in our conversation when Victoria describes having all this mental energy for the “adult world” while living almost entirely in the baby world. She was physically exhausted, but creatively restless. Those two things can exist together, and you might recognise that feeling too: you're tired of thinking about what comes next and simultaneously unable to stop thinking about it.
Maybe you keep returning to the same idea. Maybe there’s something you could happily talk about for an hour. Maybe you feel completely different after you've spent an afternoon writing, gardening, volunteering, making something or being around a certain group of people. Don't immediately ask any of these things to become your new career. Just notice them.
I think restlessness gets a bad reputation. We can treat it as something to calm down or get rid of, but sometimes restlessness contains information. Your energy might know something before the rest of you has caught up.
3. Don't wait to feel confident
Victoria eventually had an idea she really liked. She wanted to start a podcast. She told a trusted friend about it and her friend thought it was a great idea. And then Victoria did nothing with it for several months because she didn't feel ready.
She wasn't a podcaster. She didn't know how to edit audio. She worried about what people would think. She'd spent several years feeling as though she'd fallen out of the world and her confidence had taken a knock. So she waited, and then this thought kept following her around: “Ready is a decision, not a feeling.”
Eventually she had to consider the possibility that perhaps the feeling of readiness wasn't coming. I think this is where we can get really stuck. We assume confidence comes first: When I feel confident, I'll apply. When I'm certain, I'll leave. When I know I'm good enough, I'll start.
But confidence often doesn't work like that. Sometimes we have to do something while feeling decidedly unconfident about it and allow the doing to change how we feel.
4. Make the decision that helps you find out more
Shortly after her 40th birthday, Victoria announced that she was starting a podcast. And then she had to learn how to make one. The decision didn't suddenly make Victoria certain. It gave her something to do.
She learned the technology. She found guests. She figured out what she wanted the podcast to be about. She made an episode and then another one. She learned what she liked, what she was good at and what she wanted to change. The first decision created the next one, and the next, until gradually there was something that looked a lot more like a direction.
When you're feeling lost, you can put enormous pressure on yourself to make the right decision. It's as though you should somehow be able to stand where you are now and accurately predict how every possible version of your future will turn out. Perhaps the decision doesn't need to do that. Perhaps it just needs to help you find out something you don't know yet.
5. Be willing to be a beginner
This might be especially difficult if you've spent years getting good at what you already do. Changing direction means becoming new at something again, and being new at something can be uncomfortable. You don't know the terminology. You don't know how everything works. Other people seem much further ahead. The first version of what you make might not be particularly good.
Victoria talks about discovering at 40 that she could be a beginner again. She could learn how to podcast. She could create her first online course. She could change the way she worked as a photographer. She could learn on the job and, importantly, she could do those things imperfectly.
When she first launched her podcast, she tried to have everything ready: the website, the branding, the social media, four episodes in the first week. She remembers editing until 3am when she had two small children and absolutely did not need to be sacrificing sleep. A year later, she launched a rebrand differently. Not everything was finished. She did it anyway.
Somewhere along the way, she'd stopped needing to know that she could do everything before allowing herself to begin. And maybe this is the kind of confidence that matters when you're lost. Not I know exactly what I'm doing, but I trust myself to find out.
By the end of our conversation, Victoria describes herself as feeling “expansive.” It's so different from where she began: small, stuck, frantic, looking at everyone else moving forward while feeling as though she'd fallen out of the world herself.
She didn't get from one place to the other because she finally figured out exactly what she should do with her life. She noticed what she missed. She followed some of her energy. She made one decision and learned from it. Then she made another.
So if you're feeling utterly stuck right now — restless, knowing there must be something else but unable to see it clearly — perhaps you don't need to answer What am I going to do with the rest of my life? That is a lot to ask of yourself on a Tuesday afternoon.
Maybe there are smaller questions: How do I want my life to feel? What gives me energy? What am I waiting to feel ready for? What could I do that would help me find out more? Where could I allow myself to be a beginner?
You don't need all five answers today. You don't even need to know where you're going yet. Perhaps you just need one of them to make your world feel a little bigger again and give you somewhere to start.
You can listen to my full conversation with Victoria Phipps MBE on A Thought I Kept, where we talk about feeling lost, motherhood and identity, ambition, creativity, perfectionism, visibility, becoming a beginner again and the thought that helped Victoria begin moving: “Ready is a decision, not a feeling.”
And if you're feeling lost yourself, our book If Lost, Start Here was made for exactly these kinds of moments: when you don't necessarily need someone to give you the answer, but you could do with somewhere to begin.