How to know what you want in life

Three ways to help you reconnect with your intuition and trust yourself

If you’re anything like me, when you come up against a big decision in life the most common advice doled out is to trust your gut or follow your heart. But what happens if you can’t decipher what your gut is telling you? Or if your heart is conflicted? This well-intentioned advice can leave you feeling untethered. Knowing what you want in life starts with knowing who you are. And for many of us that question is harder to answer than we think. 

Whether you’re deciding to make a career shift, walk away from a relationship, or move to a new city, you can use these three principles to make a decision that is most aligned with you. 

Practice stillness to listen inward

As a type-A doer, this is the hardest one for me. While writing this post, I had a few sacred minutes while my daughter was napping and I had to decide if I wanted to do my mindfulness practice or write. I ended up choosing the former, but my instinct toward the more “productive” task was there. 

I know I’m not alone in my addiction to doing. The constant ping of our phones, unrealistic productivity expectations at work, AI giving us access to the world’s intelligence with the click of a button–none of it encourages idle time. Unfortunately, there is no getting around the need to be still if you want to know and trust yourself on a deeper level. Stillness gives our mind time to recalibrate and to process experiences and emotions. Silence provides rich territory for us to learn about our mind and soul, if we are willing.

I’d encourage you to take just three minutes to give this practice a try. Start by finding a comfortable place to sit, take a few grounding breaths and then focus on your inhale and exhale as the rhythm of your breath steadies. As you settle in, notice where your thoughts are pulling you. Tune in to whether there is something that feels unsettled in your body or if there is a part of you that has been quietly waiting for your attention. When something comes up allow yourself to observe it, name it, and then refocus on your breath. 

You can use your meditations to explore the question you are wrestling with. While sitting in stillness, bring it to mind. Notice if anything surfaces when you do. Try out different courses of action and sit with each to notice how it feels in your system. Does one bring a sense of excitement? Tension? Does one make you feel at ease? Use this as helpful data when considering which path to take. 

After each practice, take a second to reflect on what came up. Explore how you might tend to those unsettled parts or take action to start living in a way that feels more aligned. Our bodies and souls are wiser than we give them credit for. 

Use journaling for self-understanding

A therapist telling someone to start journaling feels almost as cliche as a nutritionist telling you to eat vegetables. Yet, it serves a valuable purpose in establishing a strong sense of self. It’s easy to live life on autopilot, going through the minutiae of your daily routine without much thought. When you take a second to reflect on an experience through writing it down, you switch gears, engaging in metacognition, thinking about what you think about. This is important because it can build your self-awareness by bringing more attention to the way you take in the world around you. 

A writing practice can be as simple as keeping a running note on your phone. Over the course of a week, bring attention to situations that feel emotionally charged, positive or negative. When you notice yourself feeling particularly happy or engaged take a second to jot down what you were doing or who you were with. Conversely, if you find yourself angry or defeated, notice what the situation and surroundings were that led to this feeling. If you are forgetful, send a reminder on your phone for before bedtime and mentally review your day taking note of any of these situations. 

After a week, review your notes. Do any themes rise to the top? When in the day, or with whom, do you feel most joyful, productive, or anxious? For bonus points, take some time with actual pen and paper once a week to write down what you learned about yourself. As you consider the question you are facing, use this to help make an aligned decision. 

Follow the open doors

I’ll never forget the advice a friend once gave me. She said that she prays, seeking guidance for direction in her life, and then takes action and explores which doors open and which ones won’t budge. Her belief is that open doors are God’s way of guiding her. I tend to agree with this. That the right choice for you isn’t always glaringly obvious, rather it can be found through a gentle nudge in a new direction, even if that comes in the form of rejection. 

There was a time in my life where I wanted to move to San Francisco. I’d gotten a short term transfer there with my advertising agency but wanted to make the move permanent. So I started applying to jobs, networking, and exploring ways to get connected and I got nothing. The week after I returned home to Chicago the world shut down as the pandemic began. It didn’t take long for me to jump in my car and drive down to Kentucky (where my then boyfriend, now husband lived) and hunker down. It also propelled me into my graduate program and ultimately a career 180. All because I walked through the open doors and didn’t stay fixated on the closed ones. 

When you bring to mind the question you are facing, what options have you considered? Are there paths you’ve walked down and they haven’t given you what you’d hoped? What about ones you haven’t tried yet? Are you finding yourself stuck on the closed doors? This subtle shift in mindset may reveal paths you hadn’t considered and help you make peace with those that weren’t for you.

There's no avoiding it — knowing oneself requires slowing down and turning inward. And it is a process, a lifelong one. With each new phase, we can uncover something new about ourselves. That, to me, is one of life's great adventures.

Perhaps these are practices you've tried in the past but abandoned, or maybe you have yet to try them out. Either way, this kind of self-exploration is often richer — and goes deeper — with support. If you're curious about what that could look like, it's exactly the work my practice centers on and I'd love to connect.

Regardless of where you're starting, you can take one step toward knowing yourself today. In fact, just by reading this article, you already have.