Not knowing who you want to become

This time of change is not only bringing us problems but also opportunities. But even when we know how to find those opportunities, the uncertainty of a changing world means that we can still find ourselves getting stuck about how best to move forward.

There are three main reasons for this. The first is overthinking. The second is when we don’t know who we want to become. Because:

If you don’t know where you want to get to, all ways forward will seem equally irrelevant.

So when we take the time to get clearer on where we most want to get to, who we most want to become, we enable ourselves to move forward faster and with more enthusiasm.

Several of the tools of Inner Leadership help to bring us that clarity:

  • The tools of Chapter 1 enable us to centre, ground, and deepen our connection with what matters most to us and who we are at our best
  • The tools of Chapters 2 and 3 help us to make clearer sense of our situations and identify more options for moving forward. (And as we gain this clarity, we’ll automatically notice which options seem more inspiring and which we want to avoid.)
  • Chapter 5 uncovers our purpose and values. These remind us of the people we most admire, the times we have felt most alive, our greatest qualities and the ways we love to apply them, and all these things will give us long-term guidance and direction
  • The tools of Chapter 4 help us to explicitly define the future we most want to create
  • And Chapter 6 enables us to focus in and describe that future in a way that will inspire us and the people around us to long to make it happen

In this time of Churning, all ways forward are uncertain and all ways forward are likely to be difficult. That’s just the way it is. But when we get clear on who we most want to become, we make it easier to choose our best next step, and inspire ourselves to actually take that step.

This is another step to becoming antifragile.

Have you ever struggled to choose your best way forward? Was that because you weren’t clear who you wanted to become? Would it be useful to give yourself that clarity and inspiration now?


Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.

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Photo By Nationaal Archief via StockPholio.net

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