If you’ve been working awhile, it can be deeply unsettling to recognize that you’ve come to a point where you don’t know what your steps forward might be.
If that’s where you find yourself, I invite you to take a deep breath and let go of any thoughts of self-judgment you may have been carrying. Just because you are more tenured in your career does not mean you are supposed to be certain about who you are or how you want to spend your time, or for whom, in your work life.
Journaling is a practice of quietly spending time with yourself, letting yourself think and hearing what you are saying to yourself. We all need to spend that time, and when we don’t the result is confusion.
Please review the following questions and pick one that resonates for you. You’ll know you’ve found the one when it sparks your own curiosity and you feel compelled to write!
- What are the elements that are contributing to my current sense of uncertainty?
- In what ways does it make sense that I would be feeling the way I’m feeling?
- If someone I love / deeply care about were experiencing something very similar, what would I want to say to them or do for them?
- If everything that was wrong were made right (whether in a straightforward or even miraculous way), how would that feel? What specific experiences would I get to have?
- What is the daily experience I am longing for? What would I get to experience morning, afternoon, and evening?
- How is a lack of self-care contributing to how I have been feeling?
- What would it really take, if I took myself seriously, to restore self-care to its rightful place in my life?
- How is my current career / job contributing to the daily experience I want to have?
- What would have to change in order for me to have 90% of my desired daily experience?
- What do I have control over that could increase my daily satisfaction?
- Knowing that the best way to regain energy is sometimes to encourage others who are worse off than myself, how can I find people who need encouragement and put myself in places where I could support them?
I hope that you are seeing in this list of questions something that takes you outside of your typical ways of thinking about yourself. Don’t try to solve everything at once. Have grace for yourself and know that this exploration takes time.
