How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life

What Do You Want Your Life to Look Like Now?

Sometimes it's easier to tell you exactly what I don't want than to tell you what I do.

I know I'm not alone in that.

You’ve lived enough life to recognize what isn’t working. Maybe it’s your job. Maybe it’s the pace you’ve been keeping. Maybe it’s the amount of yourself you’ve given to work, responsibility or other people’s expectations. Or maybe nothing is particularly wrong, but you’ve started to realize that the life you’ve been living isn’t the life you want to keep building.

That realization can feel significant.

Until you ask yourself a much harder question.

What do I want instead?

That’s where things can get uncomfortable.

Because you may have spent months, maybe even years, thinking about what needs to change. You can tell me what you’re tired of. What no longer fits. What you don’t want to keep doing for another five or ten years.

But describing the life you actually want?

That may be harder.

I understand that more than I used to.

There are things about this chapter of my own life that I’m very clear about. I know I want greater control over my time. I want the work I do to matter to me. I want room for the people and things that matter beyond work. And I don’t want to build another version of success that requires me to give those things away in order to achieve it.

But knowing those things doesn’t mean I have every detail of what comes next figured out.

For a while, I think I saw that as a problem.

If I know this isn’t the life I want, shouldn’t I know exactly what I want instead?

Until last year, that not knowing would keep me in places, situations and relationships longer than I probably should have been.

I was a planner. A strategist, if you will.

I needed to see the outcome before I moved. I needed to see the next position or space to occupy.

I used to call that clarity.

Now, I’m not sure that’s how clarity works.

Sometimes clarity arrives in pieces.

Sometimes the first thing you become clear about isn’t where you’re going. It’s what you’re no longer willing to keep carrying with you.

That probably doesn’t feel like much of an answer when what you really want is a plan.

But I’m beginning to think we underestimate how valuable it is.

Because knowing what you don’t want isn’t the absence of clarity.

It may be the beginning of it.

The question is what you do with that information.

Are You Looking for Clarity or Certainty?

Maybe you’re like me.

For a long time, I thought being clear meant being able to see what came next.

If I was going to leave something, I needed to know where I was going. If I was going to make a significant change, I wanted to understand how that change was going to work. I wanted a plan, an outcome and some reasonable assurance that I wasn’t trading something I knew for something that might turn out to be worse.

I called that clarity.

Looking back, I think what I was really looking for was certainty.

Those aren't the same thing.

Certainty says: I need to know where this ends before I begin.

Clarity can say: I know enough about what matters to make the next decision.

That's a very different standard.

And maybe a more realistic one.

Because there aren't many important decisions in life that come with the ending already revealed. We make choices about careers, relationships, where we live, what we pursue and what we leave behind without really knowing how the story is going to turn out.

We make the best decision we can with what we know at the time.

And then we live.

That's the part I think we sometimes overlook.

Living gives us information.

There are things I wanted twenty or thirty years ago that made complete sense for the person I was then. There were opportunities I wanted, professional milestones I wanted to reach and things I wanted to prove to myself.

Some of them I achieved. Some I didn't.

Either way, I came away knowing more than I knew before.

I learned that you can be good at something and not want to spend the rest of your life doing it. That earning more money doesn't automatically make the way you earn it worth the trade. That being needed can feel good until being needed leaves too little room for you.

And I've learned that something you once wanted badly can eventually become something you need to reconsider.

That doesn't mean the original choice was wrong.

It means you're making today's choices with information you didn't have when you made yesterday's.

At this stage of my life, I'm not making decisions with the same information I had at 25, 35 or even 45.

I know more about what achievement costs me. More about how I want to spend my time.

More about what matters when nobody is handing out awards for it.

And I know there are things I once would have said yes to almost automatically that I would have to think much harder about today.

That's part of what I was wrestling with when I wrote about what I'm willing to stop choosing for the life I say I want.

But there's another side to that question.

Once you know what you don't want to keep choosing, how do you figure out what belongs in its place?

I’m learning you don't have to figure it all out at once.

You may not have a blueprint.

But you have evidence.

Pay Attention to What You Already Know

One of the things I’ve noticed about myself over the past year is that I’ve gotten much more specific about what I don’t want.

And I’m learning that the more specific I get, the more useful that information becomes.

Take work.

After spending my career in television, I know I still love the work. I love storytelling. I love producing. I love taking an idea and figuring out how to turn it into something people can see, hear or experience.

So when I say I don't want to go back to the life I had before, I'm not saying I don't want to produce anymore.

I'm learning that I don't want production, or any work for that matter, to have the same claim on my life that it once did.

That's different.

The work isn't necessarily what I'm rejecting.

I'm questioning the relationship I had with it.

And once I got more specific about that, I had information I could actually use.

Sometimes the first statement is just the surface of something you're beginning to understand about yourself.

Maybe you've realized you need something that challenges a different part of you.

Maybe you've spent so much of your life being responsible for everyone and everything that you're beginning to wonder what would happen if some of that energy belonged to you again.

Maybe that thing that once mattered enormously simply doesn't matter as much anymore.

That's why I don't think “I don't want this anymore” is a conclusion.

It's information.

The useful part is figuring out what the information is telling you.

There’s a difference between wanting to escape something and understanding what your experience with it has taught you.

One sends you running away.

The other can start giving you direction.

If I know I don't want work to consume my life anymore, that tells me something about how I value my time. If achievement is no longer my primary measure of whether I'm doing well, my definition of success is changing.

None of those answers tells me exactly what the next five years of my life should look like.

But they tell me something about what should be present in them.

What you're rejecting may be telling you something about what you're reaching for.

And that's worth paying attention to.

Starting Over or Building Something Different?

If you are post 40 and find yourself sitting in this post, I can imagine you’re thinking:

This feels like starting over again.

I felt the same way this past year and honestly it still creeps in even now.

For a long time, I had a pretty conventional idea of what starting over looked like.

You leave one thing and replace it with another. A new job. A new position. A new company. Maybe a new city.

There was something reassuring about those tangibles. The next thing was recognizable. You could explain it to people. More importantly, you could explain it to yourself.

Starting over feels different when you've already spent decades building something.

You have experience. You've developed skills. You've made mistakes and learned from them. Maybe you've built a reputation, raised a family, accumulated responsibilities and gotten pretty good at being the person you've become.

So the idea of starting over can feel less like possibility and more like losing ground.

I didn't want everything I'd spent decades learning and building to suddenly count for nothing simply because I wanted something different.

Eventually, I started to realize that wasn't what was happening.

I wasn't starting over. I was building something different.

This chapter of my life hasn't been about replacing one thing with another.

I'm not replacing one television job with another. I'm building a coaching practice. I'm producing a podcast. I'm continuing to work in production, but I'm thinking differently about the role I want that work to play in my life.

I'm using things I've spent decades developing.

Storytelling.

Listening.

Asking questions.

Finding the real issue underneath the obvious one.

Helping someone take a complicated story and find the thread running through it.

Leading when things are uncertain.

Those skills belonged in my television career.

They also belong here.

What's changing isn't everything I've accumulated.

What's changing is what I'm choosing to build with it.

That's an idea that has become increasingly important to me, and it's why the first part of the L.I.F.E. Method I use in my coaching is Leverage.

Leverage begins with what you already have.

It asks you to look at what your life has already given you and decide how you can use it differently.

Because changing your life doesn't require you to erase it.

Your experience comes with you, along with your strengths, relationships, resources and the lessons you've learned from what worked and what didn't.

So does the self-knowledge you've gained from finally becoming clear about what you don't want anymore.

You don't start from scratch when you're building something different.
You’re starting from experience.

For me, that has changed the way I think about what comes next.

Instead of asking myself to imagine an entirely new life from nothing, I can ask a different question:

What do I already have that belongs in the life I'm building now?

I don't have to know exactly what the finished version looks like to begin answering that.

And neither do you.

What Does Building Differently Actually Look Like?

I know I’ve unpacked a lot.

Here is where I think things get a little harder.

It’s one thing to realize you want something different. It’s another to start making choices that reflect it.

I can say I want greater control over my time. I can say relationships matter more to me now. I can say I want to do meaningful work and build a life that isn't organized entirely around my career.

I can mean every word of it.

But if I continue making the same choices I made when work occupied the center of my life, what have I actually changed?

I'm confronting some of that in my own life now.

I have more control over my time than I've probably ever had. And I've discovered that having control over your time and knowing how you want to use it are two different things.

Nobody is telling me I have to be at work at a certain hour. Nobody is deciding when I can take a day off. Nobody is handing me a schedule that automatically determines what gets my attention.

That sounds like freedom.

Sometimes it is.

But it also means I have to decide what deserves my time.

And I can still fill a day.

I can work on PR4LIFE. I can work on the podcast. I can pursue production opportunities. I can answer emails, work on the website, think about marketing, handle something at church or find seventeen other perfectly legitimate things that need to be done.

I can build a very busy life while telling myself I'm building a different one.

That realization has made me think differently about what change actually requires.

It isn't enough to know that something matters to me.

What I say matters eventually has to show up in how I live.

And that's harder than it sounds.

Changing what I value doesn't automatically change the habits I've spent years developing. I can know what matters to me now and still catch myself making choices according to what mattered before.

That's something I'm still working through.

I'm learning that building differently isn't only about becoming clear about what matters. At some point, what you're learning about yourself has to begin making its way into the choices you're actually making.

That’s what I call integration in my coaching.

It’s not about creating another list of things you should be doing.
It’s not about changing everything at once.

It's beginning to close the distance between what you say matters and the way you're actually living.

And here's what can be easy to miss:

You can change the circumstances without changing the patterns.

New job. Same relationship with work.

More money. Same definition of success.

More control over your time. Same inability to protect it.

Different relationship. Same expectations of ourselves inside it.

Building differently isn't just about replacing what you don't want with something you think you'll like better.

It's allowing what you're learning about yourself to change the choices you're making now.

This doesn't require a ten-year plan.

The next opportunity? It gets evaluated differently.

That automatic yes? Now gets a little more consideration.

That time you would have given away? You stop long enough to protect it.

Maybe you stop asking whether something is a good opportunity and start asking whether it belongs in the life you're building.

The choices won’t look particularly dramatic from the outside.

But that's how something different begins to take shape.

Not necessarily through one enormous decision.

Sometimes through a series of increasingly aligned ones.

Final Thought: Maybe You Know More Than You Think

I started this chapter with the question what do I want my life to look like now?

I thought the hard part was figuring out what I wanted.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

I think sometimes the harder part is trusting that what we already know is enough to begin.

I wanted the complete picture because the complete picture always felt safer.

Maybe, like me, you want to know what the new career looks like, where the opportunity leads, whether the relationship works, whether the risk pays off and whether the life you're imagining will actually be better than the one you already know.

I understand that.

There are still moments when I would love someone to hand me the blueprint for the next five or ten years of my life.

But I'm beginning to accept that I probably wouldn't trust it anyway.

Because I'm still living those years.

I'm still learning things about myself that I couldn't have known before I got here.

And maybe that's the point.

The life I'm building now isn't coming from one big revelation about what I want.

It's taking shape from what I've learned about what matters to me, what no longer fits, what I already have, what I'm willing to use differently and the choices I'm making because of it.

Some of those choices are significant.

Others probably wouldn't look like much to anyone else.

But they're mine.

And increasingly, they're being made with a better understanding of the person I am now, rather than the person I was ten or twenty years ago.

Maybe that's what building differently looks like.

Not having the entire future figured out.

Not waiting for certainty before you move.

And not assuming that because you can't describe the finished life yet, you don't know anything about the life you want.

You may already know more than you think.

Maybe you know what deserves more of your time.

Maybe you know what has taken enough of it.

Maybe you know what you want to carry forward and what you're ready to stop organizing your life around.

Maybe you know what matters now in a way you couldn't have known ten years ago.

That's not the whole picture.

But maybe you don't need the whole picture to start building.

If you are still sorting your way through, the True You Identity Guide can help you look more closely at who you are now, beyond the roles, expectations and definitions of success that may have shaped earlier chapters of your life.
Download the True You Identity Guide

If the challenge isn’t recognizing that you want something different, but putting the pieces together, or if you’re ready to take a deeper look at what you want, what you already have and what building differently could look like for you, I invite you to a PR4LIFE Strategy Session. It gives us the space to start working through it together.
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Live on Purpose. Lead with Clarity. Thrive by Design.

TL;DR

Knowing what you don’t want doesn’t mean you should already have the rest of your life figured out. What no longer fits can give you valuable information about what matters to you now. And especially post 40, you’re not starting from scratch. You have experience, skills and lessons you can use differently. You don’t need the whole picture to start building something different. Sometimes clarity is simply knowing enough to make the next choice differently.