How the signal went quiet
Someone asks what you want. You give a good answer. Later, alone in the car, you notice it was the answer that fit the room. The honest answer is that you don’t know.
For someone who always knows the next step, that’s unsettling. It’s also predictable. If you spent twenty years reading what your boss, your clients, your market and your family needed, you got very good at that channel. The channel that tells you what you need got less use, and it faded.
There’s often a second layer. Even when a want does surface, a sentence arrives to shut it down: “That’s not realistic.” “You have responsibilities.” “Who do you think you are?” “Be grateful for what you have.” Over the years you stop hearing the want at all, because the sentence gets there first.
Why introspection alone stalls
The usual advice is to reflect: journal, take a personality test, list your values, imagine your ideal life. These can help a little. They also keep the whole search inside your head, where the old habit lives. It keeps proposing answers that sound sensible and change nothing.
Herminia Ibarra studied professionals who made major career changes. People who got somewhere rarely started by working out what they wanted. They ran small experiments and met people outside their usual circle, and a direction formed from what they learned (Ibarra, 2002). Knowing came after doing.
There’s another reason. People expect to change much less over the next ten years than they did over the last ten, a pattern researchers called the end-of-history illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert & Wilson, 2013). So when you try to imagine what you’ll want, you tend to picture today’s self with a different job. The person who’ll live that future will have changed more than you think. Experiments let you meet that person a little earlier.
Your body notices before your head does
The quieter signal lives in your body. A tight chest before a meeting you say you’re fine with. Energy after one kind of conversation and none after another. A pull toward something you can’t justify yet. A heaviness that arrives every Sunday at about six.
There’s research behind taking this seriously. Barnaby Dunn and colleagues found that people who perceived their own heartbeat more accurately made better intuitive decisions in a card game where body signals carried useful information. The same sensitivity led them astray when the signals pointed the wrong way, so treat the body as information to check, and know it can be wrong (Dunn et al., 2010). In a small study of London financial traders, those who sensed their heartbeat better made more money and lasted longer in the job (Kandasamy et al., 2016).
Emotion research adds a related point: emotions are embodied. Posture and breath are part of how a feeling is made and recognised (Niedenthal, 2007). That’s why I often work with clients on the move, outdoors. A body that’s walking and breathing freely gives clearer signals than one that’s been sitting in meetings all day.
Naming what you feel turns it into information
Feelings you can’t name tend to run you. Feelings you can name become information you can use.
In a brain-imaging study led by Matthew Lieberman, putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala, a region involved in emotional alarm (Lieberman et al., 2007). Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight reviewed research on emotion differentiation, the ability to tell apart similar feelings such as frustrated, irritated, disappointed and embarrassed. People who do this well cope better with stress and fall back on unhelpful habits less often when things get hard (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015).
So “I feel bad” is a start. “I feel flat, and a bit ashamed that I feel flat” is something you can work with.
A practical way to find what you want
1. Sketch a Tuesday a year from now, roughly. How would you like it to feel, from the inside? What would someone watching see you do? Leave gaps where you don’t know. A rough sketch gives you something to test, and you’ll redraw it many times.
2. Notice what your head says about the sketch. Write the sentence word for word. “That’s naive.” “You’d never earn enough.” Don’t argue with it yet. Just keep it on paper, where you can look at it.
3. Choose two small experiments. Each should take less than a week and touch the real world: a conversation with someone who does work you’re curious about, a weekend trying something, a small offer to a few people, a day shadowing someone. Make each specific, with a day and a time.
4. Read both compasses, before, during and after. Inner: what happened in your body and emotions? Name it as precisely as you can. Outer: how did people respond? What did they say, and what didn’t happen?
5. Look for pull, and for drain. Over a few weeks, look for what gave you energy even when it was hard, and what drained you even when it went well. Pull points the way. Drain is just as useful, because it rules things out.
6. Check the sentence again. Go back to what your head said in step 2. After a few experiments, is it still true? Often it was a guess you’d never tested.
7. Redraw the sketch, and pick the next two experiments. In my experience a direction shows up after six to ten experiments, and it rarely matches the one you would have planned.
A composite example
Details from several clients, combined and changed.
Tomaž had been a sales director for eleven years. When I asked what he wanted, he said “something more meaningful” and then went quiet. He didn’t know, and it frightened him.
His Tuesday sketch was thin: “Outside more. Fewer meetings. Mornings free. People more than spreadsheets.” His head’s sentence: “You’re 43. You’re not going to become a teacher now.”
His first two experiments: a morning helping a friend who runs outdoor programmes for teenagers, and a coffee with a former colleague who’d left to start an agency. The agency coffee drained him, which surprised him, because on paper it was the obvious move. The morning with the teenagers left him buzzing for two days.
He didn’t become a teacher. Over the next months, experiments pointed him toward training and mentoring young salespeople, inside his own company at first, and later on his own. The sentence about teaching turned out to be half right. He didn’t want to teach children. He did want to teach.
When it’s harder than this
If you can’t find pull in anything at all, and it’s been that way for months, the problem may be energy rather than direction. Read Burnout or the wrong mountain? first, and talk to a doctor if it fits.
One thing to try this week
Book one conversation with someone whose work or life you’re curious about. Before it, name how you feel in one precise word. After it, name the word again, and write one thing they said that stayed with you. Notice whether you’d want a second conversation. That’s the first reading.