You don’t need a five-year plan. You need a next act.
Sometimes you know exactly what needs to change in your life. You hate your job. A relationship needs to end. Your business isn’t working. Something has happened that forces you to make a decision, even if making it scares the hell out of you.
But there is another kind of change that I think is much harder to explain, where nothing is necessarily terribly wrong but everything feels kind of... off. Your life might actually look pretty good from the outside. You have a job, a business, a home, relationships, routines. You are doing all the things you are supposed to be doing. And still, somewhere in the back of your head, there is a little voice asking: is this it?
Now, maybe you just have a bit of a october depression and should take some vitamin D, but, sometimes there’s more to it.
I’ve written before about why I think we should pay more attention to that voice. You don’t need to wait for your life to fall apart before you are allowed to change it. Sometimes you have simply outgrown a version of your life that once fitted you perfectly well.
The difficult part is what comes after that realisation. If you know you want something different but don’t know what that different thing is, what can you actually do?
I don’t think the answer is to immediately quit your job, move to Bali or launch a podcast. (Although believe me, people rush into those things all the time, and I’m not judging, I see the allure.) But I think the best way to start is by getting curious. You don’t have to know what your next act is yet. You can start planning it before you know exactly where it will take you.
And no, you’re not too old and it’s not too late.
Here are five places you could start. Choose what speaks to you. ⬇️
1. Take stock of where you are now
Before you start designing a new life, career or business, I think it’s worth getting really clear about the one you already have. We are often so focused on what comes next that we forget to ask what is actually working now.
You don’t have to hate your current life to want to change it. There are probably things in it that you absolutely want to keep. There might be work you’re brilliant at and still enjoy, people you want to continue working with, routines that make you feel good, financial security you don’t want to give up or parts of your identity that still feel completely like you. A new beginning doesn’t have to mean throwing everything out.
At the same time, there are probably things that don’t fit quite as well anymore. Maybe you’ve become good at something you no longer particularly enjoy doing. Maybe you’ve built a business around work you don’t actually want more of. Maybe the career goal you’ve been working towards doesn’t feel as interesting now that you’re getting closer to it. Maybe you’re just tired of something.
Try to look at all of it without immediately solving anything. You don’t need to turn every feeling into a decision.
Here’s a simple exercise to help you get clarity:
Take a piece of paper and make three columns: more, less, keep.
What do you want more of in your work and life? What do you want less of? What is already good that you absolutely want to take with you?
That’s enough to start.
2. Look for clues instead of trying to find the answer
I don’t particularly like the advice to “find your passion”. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on something that can actually be much simpler.
If you’re trying to figure out what you want next, there are probably already clues all over your current life.
Pay attention to what makes you jealous. I genuinely think jealousy can be useful information if you stop feeling guilty about it. When you see someone else’s career, business or life and feel that little sting, ask yourself what you actually want from it. You might not want their job at all. Maybe you want their freedom. Their creativity. The fact that they get paid for their ideas. The fact that they travel. The fact that they seem to have built something that belongs to them.
Look at what you keep coming back to. The subjects you read about when nobody has told you to. The conversations you could have for hours. The people whose work you follow. The things you save. The things people ask you for help with. The part of your current work that you would happily do more of and the part you would be delighted never to do again.
Look at your energy too. There are things that can make perfect sense on paper and still drain the life out of you, and other things that are objectively difficult but somehow leave you with more energy than you had before you started.
I think we sometimes expect our next act to arrive as a fully formed idea. A new business! A new career! I’m moving to France! More often, I think it starts as a collection of tiny signals that don’t look particularly significant until you put them next to each other.
So collect them.
For one week, keep a note on your phone called Clues. Every time something makes you think I want more of that, I want less of that or simply that’s interesting, write it down. Don’t make it into a plan yet. At the end of the week, look at what keeps showing up.
WHY am I making you wait a week? How evil and annoying, I know.. but seriously, when it comes to something as important as your life, your career and your future - wouldn’t you rather make sure you have a really good basis for your future decisions?
3. Work out how you actually want to feel
When we’re told to imagine our future, we tend to immediately start filling it with things. A house. A certain income. A business of a particular size. A book. A job title. A number of followers. Working four days (or hours) a week. Moving somewhere warmer. Specific goals we can put on a vision board and work towards.
Don’t get me wrong, those things can be good. I have goals too. But if we don’t dig a little deeper underneath them before we set them, we might spend years going after things that we don’t actually want, even though we think we do.
I have goals too. But if we don’t dig a little deeper underneath them before we set them, we might spend years going after things that we don’t actually want, even though we think we do.
We are programmed to want certain things. We see what success is supposed to look like from our families, our industries, our friends, social media and the culture around us. Then it’s very easy to confuse the symbol of the thing we want with the feeling we’re actually trying to create.
You don’t necessarily want the house. Maybe you want to feel safe?
You don’t necessarily want to be self-employed. Maybe you want autonomy?
You don’t necessarily want the big job title. Maybe you want to feel respected?
You don’t necessarily want to travel constantly. Maybe you want adventure and novelty?
You don’t necessarily want to write a book. Maybe you want to feel creative, intellectually challenged or like your ideas matter?
Years ago, I did an exercise from Danielle LaPorte’s The Desire Map that I’ve since returned to several times. She calls them your Core Desired Feelings, and the idea is to peel back the layers of what you think you want until you get closer to how you actually want to feel in your life.
I found this incredibly useful. Instead of immediately asking what my future should look like, I could ask how I wanted it to feel. Connected. Free. Creative. Safe. Challenged. Useful. Playful. Independent. In momentum. Whatever the words were for me at that particular point in my life.
And those words can change. That’s kind of the point.
So before you decide what your next act should look like, take another piece of paper and ask yourself:
How do I want my life to feel?
How do I want my work to feel?
How do I want my body to feel?
How do I want my relationships to feel?
Write everything down and then start peeling back the layers. If you write “successful”, what does successful actually feel like to you? Is it freedom? Pride? Security? Recognition? If you write “rich”, what is the feeling underneath that? Choice? Safety? Ease?
Try to get down to a handful of feelings that really matter to you right now.
Then you can start asking a much more interesting question: what kind of life, work and business could give me more of this feeling? THAT is when we get to the good stuff, but only after doing the work. Don’t skip it.
4. Try things before turning them into your new identity
Once you start seeing some possibilities, you don’t have to choose one immediately.
We spend an incredible amount of time thinking about decisions we could actually test. You don’t have to decide whether you should “become a speaker”. Find somewhere to speak and see how it feels. You don’t need to decide whether you’re a writer before you start writing. You don’t need a complete business before finding out whether someone will pay for what you want to sell. If you’re curious about a completely different industry, talk to people who already work in it before retraining for it.
There is something wonderfully undramatic about treating your future as an experiment. You aren’t announcing a new identity or committing the next ten years of your life to it. You’re collecting information.
And if there are several things you are drawn towards, here is another question I find incredibly useful: if I knew that whatever I chose would be successful, what would I most want to do?
If I knew that whatever I chose would be successful, what would I most want to do?
Take success out of the equation for a moment. Imagine the book works. The podcast works. The business works. The new career works. Nobody thinks you’ve made a stupid decision and you aren’t going to embarrass yourself.
Which one do you actually WANT to spend your time doing?
Maybe starting a podcast seems like an incredibly smart thing to do for your business. Great. But if thinking about finding guests, recording every week and keeping it going already makes you feel exhausted, that is information. Maybe writing a book is less obviously “smart”, but the thought of spending a year developing your ideas makes you ridiculously excited. That’s information too.
Of course success can matter. Money matters. Your responsibilities matter. But I don’t think those things should edit your desires before you’ve even had a chance to understand them.
And you don’t have to know whether something will work before you start exploring it. Try the smallest possible version first. Have one conversation. Make something. Go somewhere. Take the class. Run the workshop. Write the article. Spend a day with someone who already does the thing you’re curious about.
Thinking gives you theories about yourself. Doing gives you information.
5. Plan the next 90 days
Now you can make a plan.
Not a five-year plan for a person you haven’t become yet. Just the next 90 days.
Ninety days is actually quite a long time. You can learn a lot, meet a lot of people, make something, test an idea, change your mind and start building something completely new in three months.
Look back at everything you’ve written so far. What you want more and less of. The clues you’ve collected. How you want your life to feel. The possibilities you want to explore.
Then decide what the next 90 days are for.
What do you want to explore? What could you try? What do you need to learn? Who could you talk to who knows something you don’t? What do you want to stop or do less of to make room for this? What could you have created, tested or learned 90 days from now that you haven’t today?
Then I would add one question that I think we often forget when we make plans like these: who do I need around me while I do it?
The people around you can make an enormous difference when you’re trying to change direction. And the people who love you aren’t necessarily always the people who will understand what you’re trying to do.
And the people who love you aren’t necessarily always the people who will understand what you’re trying to do.
Your partner can be wonderful and your relationship can be great, but they might not understand why you suddenly want to start a business. Your oldest friends might love you dearly but have absolutely no interest in talking about the thing you’re trying to build. Your colleagues might think leaving a perfectly good career sounds insane. (Your mom might think leaving your perfect husband makes you a lunatic.) Etc. etc.
That doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with those relationships. It might simply mean you need to build the missing parts of your support system somewhere else.
Maybe you need other entrepreneurs or friends around you. Maybe you need someone who has already made the transition you’re considering. A mentor. A coach. A community. A friend who understands this part of you. Someone you can call when you have convinced yourself that the whole thing is ridiculous.
So as part of your 90-day plan, do a little support audit too. Who is already in your corner? What kind of support are you missing? Where could you find it?
And finally, ask yourself:
What could you start building now that would make your next act easier?
Maybe that’s a skill. Savings. Relationships. A body of work. Proof. Knowledge. An audience. A reputation. A personal brand.
These are all ASSETS, and you don’t need to know exactly where you’re going before you start building them.
This is actually the part of personal branding that I find much more interesting than posting on social media. If you know roughly where you want to go next, you can start making it easier for opportunities in that direction to find you. You can start talking about the things you want to be known for. You can build relationships in the world you want to enter. You can make your knowledge visible. You can create proof.
Your next act doesn’t begin the day you hand in your notice, launch the company, publish the book or make some big announcement on LinkedIn.
Most of it starts much earlier, when nobody is really watching.
It starts backstage.
And maybe after 90 days you’ll have figured out exactly what you want to do next. Maybe you won’t. Maybe one of the things you were convinced you wanted will have turned out to be completely wrong for you, while something you barely noticed at the beginning has become much more interesting.
That’s okay.
You don’t need to have your whole next act figured out. You just need to know more than you knew 90 days ago.
So, what are you waiting for? Go direct your next act.
I hope this helped, and if you need me, I’m only a message away. ❤️
/M.