How to move forward when you don’t have clarity yet.

In the last episode, I talked about the feeling of outgrowing an old identity. The moment when your life still looks “fine” from the outside… but inside, you know something no longer fits.

This episode is about what came after that.

How do you move forward when you have absolutely no idea what you want next?
How do you rebuild yourself after feeling completely disconnected from your own life?

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why taking the pressure off yourself matters more than “having a plan”
• How following small moments of joy helped me reconnect with myself
• What I did to get more clarity
• The boundaries I decided to set for my future
• and the unexpected decision I made that helped me move forward again

If you are in a phase where you just quit something that no longer works for you, and you wish you had more clarity, this episode is for you. 

I'm so happy you're here!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of Inner Language. My name is Alice, and in this episode, I'm going to talk about how do you move forward when you don't have clarity yet. So, in the last episode, we talked about this moment that I felt so stuck in an old identity. I was doing a job, I was running an Instagram channel, and I came to a point where I realized that none of these things were working out for me anymore. And I knew I had to quit, and I told you about the signs, how I recognized that I had to quit when I knew that it was time for me to leave something. I told you about the fears that I was struggling with during that time. But now comes the question: how did I move on from that? What were some things that helped me get clarity? And what did I decide to do eventually? So, how did I get from being completely stuck to starting my next step? That's what we're going to talk about today. I am so happy that you're here. There were situations piling up, it was getting worse every single day. It got to a point where I had to drag myself to the office. I was like crying on the phone, talking to my mom, telling her, I don't know what to do, I cannot quit this, but I also can't keep going. And it was my mom who told me, but you know what to do. And at that moment I knew, yeah, I know I have to quit, but how do I find the courage to quit? And and then I just did it. I sent an email, I sent in my notice, and eventually I quit my job. And I knew the only thing I knew at that point is not what the next step was, not what I was gonna do, like none of that. The only thing I knew, and that I wanted, is that I needed a break. I wanted to not work for a while. Now I was lucky enough to be in a financial situation that I had some savings so I could afford to take a break and to not work for a while. But of course, my mind was still racing, and something that I was doing a lot, I remember, that just didn't help me is that I was really, really looking for security. I was thinking, I'm totally fine taking a break, I'm totally fine if I need to recover and my body needs time to heal. But how long does it last? I was I remember like looking up, Googling, like if you are stressed out from work, if you are almost burnout, or if you are burnout, like how long exactly does this last? I was looking for someone to tell me exactly, like, okay, this takes three months, this takes six months or a year or anything. I was just looking for a timeline because I felt if I know this only takes two months, then I'm fine taking a break for two months if I know that all of a sudden then my motivation will come back again. Because that was another thing I was very worried about. Is I not only lost my joy, but I also lost all the inspiration, all the motivation that I had because I put a lot of creativity also into my Instagram channel, and all of that was gone. I didn't have any ideas, I didn't have inspiration, I didn't have motivation to start a next project, for example, like the one that I'm doing right now, and I remember being so scared that this would never come back to me, that this joy or the creativity, the ideas that I used to have in life would never come back to me. And that's such a scary place to be at. And if I just look back on that now, it's almost I realized like, oh god, I was so depressed. It really got to a point where I felt like I was so depressed. You think it would be a relief as soon as you quit a job like that, but the reality is that it wasn't, because all of a sudden everything got even more uncertain and I lost my stability. And even though I was financially fine, there was still kind of this pressure inside of me like I do need to find a job within a couple of months. Because if not, then of course I will be in a financial more difficult situation. I don't live with my parents, I live by myself, so it's like my rent needs to be paid, all my expenses, I need to go grocery shopping, like all of that continues. So there was a certain pressure that I felt within this amount of time, I need to be fine again and I need to be able to start working. So yeah, I was in kind of a panic mode trying to get certainty until at some point I decided that this wasn't helping, and that that this pressure that I was putting on myself wasn't helping me heal. So the very first step that I took, or the very first decision that I took, that I just really, really recommend you to do if you are in a similar situation, is to completely take off the pressure off yourself. I stopped trying to figure it all out, you know, figure out like how long does this last? When will I get better? All of that. This going in overdrive, trying to fix it, trying to fix like what did I need to learn from this? Like, why did the situation happen to me? Like, I was desperately wanting to get answers, and I didn't get them. There wasn't anyone who could tell me them, which was very frustrating because I'm a person who wants to know everything. I just want to do research until I understand things, and when I don't understand things, it's very frustrating to me. But that was a lesson I needed to learn to stop doing this research and just allow myself to not be okay. It's kind of this accepting of I am I'm miserable right now, I am not happy right now, and that's okay, and not going in overdrive of trying to fix that situation. I feel like we're so programmed to always be happy again, and if you are not happy, then to work towards being happy again. And something that really helped me is to just allow myself to not be happy for a while, because to be honest, it is not the end of the world. It's not bad if you are in a phase, even if it takes you three months or five months or whatever, to just not be happy, but allow yourself to feel that, to feel sad, to release all the pressure and all the expectations that you put on yourself. That was the first step for me towards recovery. But of course, that wasn't easy because the people in your surroundings, not all of them get it. I got many questions from people in my surroundings. Like, okay, but alright, so you quit your job. What's the next step? What are you gonna do now? Are you applying somewhere or where do you want to apply? And my answer was always, I don't know. No, I'm not applying because right now I am not ready for it. I was looking up for vacancies, but the second I was reading, like we're looking for someone who is able to manage multiple tasks, who can deal with stress, someone who's like very social, someone who goes out there, who is proactive, like just reading all these vacancies just already made me feel even more exhausted to a point where I thought, like, I I cannot do that, I don't have the energy to do any of that. So we would close internet and I would feel depressed again, like I will never be able to do this again. You know, all these thoughts that come into your mind. So people ask me a lot, where do you want to work? I don't know. Okay, but then where what do you want to do? It's like I don't know what I want to do. At this point, I want to do nothing. My answer was always the only thing I want to do is nothing. And people don't get that. It's like, yeah, but you're gonna just sit on the couch all day and like stare at the wall, or what do you mean? It's like, no, with nothing, I kind of mean like I want to do a lot of reflecting, I want to go on long walks, I want to spend time by myself, I want to do things that bring me joy. I want to do yoga, I want to meditate, I want to go for a run, I want to do things that don't require me to produce anything. Things that I have time to process whatever happened in the last couple of months. That's the only thing I had energy for at that point. So that's exactly what I did. I followed the joy, I created space to think. So I went on really long walks. I sometimes even just packed a backpack with food and water and my journal, and I would like go to the forest and I would spend there like six hours by myself writing things down, looking back on me, these moments in the forest, these long walks that I took where I just disappeared and I just lost track of time. They were incredibly healing for me. And also all the other things doing yoga, meditating. I visited people that I hadn't seen in ages, that I always thought, like, oh, we need to meet up, but then you know, life gets busy and you never do it. I made a list of everyone that I wanted to see, and I visited them. I always had on my list that I wanted to read the books of Harry Potter. I've never read them in my life, even though I have all the books, they are in my bookshelf for almost my entire life, and I have never found the time to pick them up. And it was the middle of winter, and I thought, okay, maybe now is the best time to do that. So I read the entire series of Harry Potter. I've watched all the movies, but I've never read the books, which is such a stupid thing because honestly, these books are amazing. I found so much joy in disappearing in into the Harry Potter work world. I just really started doing things that brought me joy, and that was also the moment I realized how little time I actually give myself to do these things. Because for some reason, and that is part of the problem, I always convince myself that I need to be productive all the time. And watching a movie and reading a book for fun, unless it's like a self-help book that I can learn anything from, but like reading Harry Potter, something for fun in my mind that wasn't considered productive. I always felt like I had to achieve something, I had to produce something, or I put so much pressure on myself. And I realized that by doing things that I truly enjoyed and that weren't necessarily considered productive, it helped me so much reflect things, process things, get the rest that I needed, and now I'm convinced that these moments are equally as important, if not more important, than the moments that you are being productive. So, as you can already hear in the story, I started getting the lessons out of everything that happened to me and realizing how hard I was on myself. So, this is what I did. I took a break, I journaled, I wrote down questions, I listened to meditations where they ask you deeper questions. Another thing I did is I made a list of everything that drained me in my work and everything that gave me energy. And the second I wrote this down, it became so clear to me why it wasn't working out because this entire job was against my personality. For example, the things that drained me were team meetings. I absolutely hate it when there are 10 people in a room and everyone is like shooting their ideas and telling what we should do better, what we should do differently, and no one takes action on anything. It's just I really it drains my energy so much. Sitting behind a desk for eight hours, looking at a computer screen all day, emails that just never stopped. I was in a traffic jam for an hour before I got to work, which also drained my energy a lot because it's like two hours of commute per day. So these were some of the things that I wrote down that drained my energy. If you hear this, then you might notice that I'm more of an introverted person and I was kind of working in a pretty extroverted job. I was forcing myself to function as an extrovert even though I am a lot more introverted. And then things that gave me energy were being outside, the days where I had to leave the office and I was like on the go, like movement in general. Doing something meaningful gives me energy. Helping other people gives me energy. Working independently is a major thing for me. I'm at my best if I can do my own project and there isn't anyone checking on me. I love it if I can work independently, having my own schedule. So I wrote down the whole list of what gives me energy in life and what drains me energy, and then it really started to make sense, and I started to connect the dots of why this wasn't working, and the whole reason why it wasn't working, and I got to a point of almost burnout. I'm saying almost burnout because I know people who get in like if you are in an actual burnout, people can't even leave the couch. I've heard stories from people who just literally had to lay on the couch and they were so exhausted that for like two months they couldn't do anything. I never got to that point. I think I just quit just in time. But if I kept on going in the job that I was in, that would have definitely happened to me. So yeah, I was trying to be a version of me that I am not. The reason I got into almost burnout is because I was pretending to be someone that I'm not, and that's exactly the reason we burn out. We try to adapt and we go against our personality just in order to fit in. And based on that list, I then set boundaries for my future. I decided what I would no longer accept in my life. So I knew the next job that I'm gonna do is one, it's not gonna be full-time because I knew I couldn't handle it yet. I knew I need more time to process this. Of course, I do need to find a job because I was in total, I was jobless for three months, but I knew the next job that I'm gonna find is not gonna have to be my dream job or something that like perfectly aligns with my personality because I knew that takes time to find that, and that's not the time that I have. So right now I need to look for something that I can do part-time, so at least I have my expenses covered. I can pay my rent, I can buy food. It doesn't have to be something high-achieving, something that gives me a super big salary or something with an insane title that puts like a lot of pressure on me. No, I just want to do something chill. And this is what I hear from other people who went through burnouts. Is some people just decide, like, you know, I'm gonna work in a supermarket for a year because that way I don't have this pressure that I had on my job. I didn't have to perform to like a maximum amount. People were thinking, I'm gonna work on a farm with animals or in a garden with plants, like anything that helps you recover, that helps you keep recovering is usually a next good step, and not going from one high achieving performance job to going to a next one. And this is really something that people sometimes don't understand, especially if they see you and they know that you're a hard worker and that you're considered more of a high achiever, and then all of a sudden you pick a job that people considered but this is below your level. It's like, yeah, but it the point is not doing something that's at my level at this point. The point is that I recover and that I find happiness again and that I feel okay again, and from that point, I can find something that does truly align with me and that does truly fulfill me. But right now I don't even know what that is, or or even if I do know what it is, I I know I cannot get there yet because I don't have the energy for that yet, and therefore I am picking something that helps me recover further. So, yeah, I decided what I would no longer accept in my life, and I didn't want to do an office job, I didn't want to sit eight hours and look at a computer screen because I knew it drains me, it gives me a headache if I just sit down. I wanted to do something where I could move, where I could be outside, where I could preferably work independently. So eventually, because I understood that and I started understanding why it wasn't working, it just led me to accepting myself more. It led to being more compassionate with myself and giving myself grace for showing up there and not being angry at myself anymore of why it wasn't working. Because that's another thing. It came with so much guilt. I really blamed myself for the fact that I couldn't do it. I had these thoughts of all of my colleagues can function in this environment except for me. Everyone can do it without getting a burnout, except for me. Like, I'm so weak, I'm such an idiot. I like all these judging that you do, it is not helping. It's really not helping. So I was doing all of that, and after a while, I slowly kind of started to get the impulse of maybe my next step is gonna be something that I told myself I would never ever do again ever in my life, because I realized previously that it wasn't working, is to go back into nursing. And if you've listened to my previous podcast episode, I already talked about this and I kind of left nursing. Not because there's anything wrong with nursing, it's a wonderful profession. I know so many people who are so happy in it. There's so much you can achieve in nursing, like helping people, it's a very fulfilling job. It's just that for me personally, it wasn't working because I have so many other interests that I couldn't express in that profession. And therefore, I decided to leave it so I could find another version of myself. But for the situation that I was in, like still trying to recover from things, I knew that in nursing I could find a lot of the things that I wrote on my list of things that gave me energy that were important for the situation that I am in right now. Because of course, in nursing there are different fields, you don't have to work in a hospital or in a very high-demanding uh department where there is a lot of work stress. You can, of course, also pick a field that has a lot less pressure. So that's eventually what I did. I went back into nursing. I decided to work part-time. I picked a field that was as low pressure as I could possibly imagine, that allowed me to work independently, that allowed me to move around, take care of people, and looking back on it now, it was the best next step I could have taken at that point. I am so happy I took that decision. But as you can imagine, when you are in that situation and you realize that you're going back into something that you have promised yourself that you would never do again in your entire life, that comes with a lot of feelings as well. The feeling of I'm such a failure, it felt like going 5,000 steps backwards, and that in itself is another podcast episode. So, that is what we are going to talk about. Next and why changing often feels like going backwards. Alright, so this is where I'm gonna leave you now. I really hope that with this episode I could help you with the question on how to find clarity. Actually, really, when I'm looking back on it, we often think that we need clarity in order to move forward, but that's actually not what you need. You need to get real with yourself. You need space, you need to take decisions. And as soon as you do that, you can trust that the clarity will come.