How to Find Clarity When You Don’t Know What You Want in Life
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Helene Christensen helps leaders make clear, grounded decisions and lead with inhabited authority. She advises and speaks at the intersection of marketing, storytelling, creative leadership, and lived human insight, helping leaders navigate change with integrity and dignity.
For years, I was in the wrong job. I had not been deceived or mistreated. I had simply ended up there, the way you end up in a lot of places in your twenties and early thirties, through a combination of opportunity, circumstance, and not yet knowing yourself well enough to make a different choice. And then years had passed, and I was still there.
The job did not use what I was actually good at. It did not make use of my personality, my creativity, or the parts of me that came alive when I was doing work that genuinely suited me. I was competent at it. I showed up. But I felt uninspired and discouraged about the amount of time it took up every day, and what it required of me to pretend as if I really cared when we had team meetings and things like that. It just wasn't me in any real sense.
So I started daydreaming. I would sneak away and study the things I actually wanted to do. I figured out how to stream online classes while sitting at my computer. It looked like I was typing up emails, but I was actually taking notes on what I was learning. I read everything I could find about the area I wanted to move into. I started building a relationship with someone in that department. Not because I was being particularly strategic, but because I couldn't help myself. It called on me to move in that direction. I can see now that I was almost preparing, without quite admitting to myself that I was preparing, for something I was terrified to ask for.
The ask I was too scared to make
What I wanted was a lateral move, to stay in the same organisation but transfer to a different department. A different kind of work. A different version of myself showing up every day. I wanted the organisation to create a role for me that didn't exist.
The fear was straightforward: what if they said no? What if asking for the thing I actually wanted meant losing the thing I had? I had never heard of anyone doing this. I did not know if it was even possible. I spent a long time convincing myself that wanting more was somehow ungrateful, unrealistic, or presumptuous.
What I eventually understood, and it took longer than I would like to admit, was that staying silent was its own kind of choice. And it was a choice I had already been making for years.
So I built the case. I started doing some of the work I wanted to do before I asked for the move, so that when I finally made my case, they could see I was serious. I had ideas. I had prepared. I asked the person I had been building a relationship with if she would support me, and she said yes. Thank God. And then I asked my boss. They said yes.
Not only that, they were glad I had asked. They had not known what I wanted because I had never told them. They valued what I brought to the organisation, and they wanted me to bring it somewhere I actually wanted to be.
I had underestimated how much they appreciated me. More than that, I had underestimated how much it mattered to them that I had something I genuinely wanted to give.
What that experience taught me in life
That lateral move changed something in me, not just professionally, but in how I understood myself. And also in how I understand how much agency we can hold, and what constitutes a great opportunity for both the individual and the organisation.
What had kept me stuck for so long was not the job. It was the absence of clarity about what I actually wanted, combined with a fear that wanting it would cost me something I couldn't afford to lose.
Once I got clear, once I could say, specifically and honestly, this is what I am good at, this is the kind of work that uses the real me, this is what I want to move toward, everything changed. Not because circumstances suddenly became easy. Because I had something to stand on.
That is the thing I keep coming back to, in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with now.
Clarity is not a feeling that arrives before you move. It is something you build by moving, by getting honest about what is true for you, naming it, and taking small steps toward it.
The problem most women in this place face
I am not unusual. I have met so many women carrying a version of this, a life that looks fine on paper, and a persistent feeling that something is off.
They are not in a crisis. They are not experiencing a breakdown. But they are going through this chronic sense, pain almost, of being out of sync with themselves.
They have tried the obvious things. They journal. They read. Some have set goals, which is what we tend to recommend when someone is confused, as though not knowing where you are going is solved by deciding more firmly that you are going somewhere. It isn't. And I think the reason is simple.
You cannot figure out the right direction before you know who you actually are. And more importantly, before you build up the courage to stand by that real version of yourself.
Most of the tools we reach for skip this step entirely. They assume you already know yourself and jump straight to what you should do. So you end up with a plan built on a foundation that hasn't been laid. You follow it for a while. And then you find yourself back in the same place, wondering why nothing has helped you feel better.
What actually helps
After my own experience, and after working with many women in similar places, I built a process called True North. It starts not with goals or plans, but with the most basic question: what is actually true for you, right now, in this season of your life?
What are your values, not your inherited values, but the ones that are actually yours? What gives you energy, and what drains it? What has your history revealed about who you are, beyond the roles and the titles? These are not soft questions. They are the most practical questions you can ask.
Because once you can answer them, once you have that clarity, you have a clear sense of your foundation to stand on. That makes you very hard to shake. And from there, one honest step becomes possible. And then another.
That is how we, as human beings, have found new meaning time and time again. We experience a tough situation that demands something from us. And it ultimately requires us to connect with our own truth, what we believe is true, and what our strengths are. And we move from there. That tends to work. We do not undergo a dramatic transformation. We take one well aimed move, made from a place of genuine self knowledge. I know because I have lived it. And I have watched it happen for others.
The thing I most want you to take from this
You do not need to know where you are going before you start moving. We have convinced ourselves that the stakes are too high now. We have too many responsibilities, too many bills to pay, too much to lose. So we wait for certainty. We wait until we have all the answers.
But we have never actually worked that way. We went to school without knowing what we wanted to do. We built careers without knowing how they would unfold. We dated someone until we met someone. Every major transition we have navigated has been a process of small steps, each one revealing a little more than the last.
That process has not stopped being available to us. We have just forgotten it applies. The clarity you are waiting for does not arrive before you move. It arrives because you move.
What I built from this
That whole realisation led me to believe that we need better language for this awkward existential place, and we need to remind ourselves that change is always possible.
We just tend to look at it as needing to take a big leap to get from A to Z. We see the change we dream of, once we have an established life built for ourselves, and we think we can never get there. It will require too much of a sacrifice from us, financially and existentially.
That is why I built True North. It is a complete self paced journey from confusion to direction, deliberately designed so you do not have to blow up your life to get there. With support from me along the way.
Four phases, each one building on the last, that take you through exactly this process. Not goal setting. Not a five year plan. A structured way of getting honest about what is actually true for you, seeing your own history clearly, understanding what you genuinely bring, and designing a next step that fits you, the real you, and the life you already have.
You can do it on a walk. On a commute. In the calm spaces of your life that already exist.
If any of this resonates, if you recognise the feeling of being in the wrong place, or wanting something different but not knowing how to name it or move toward it, True North was built for exactly that moment. Learn more here.
Read more from Helene Christensen
Helene Christensen, Leadership Advisor & Speaker
Helene Christensen is an advisor and speaker working with leaders navigating change, uncertainty, and high-stakes decisions. She is the creator of The Inner Authority Method, a framework that helps leaders develop embodied authority and make grounded decisions without relying on performance or persuasion. Her work combines strategic expertise in storytelling and creative leadership with lived human insights shaped by major professional and personal transitions. She has worked with leaders and organizations across Europe and the United States. Her writing explores leadership, dignity, and what gives work meaning - including how leaders can regain direction, energy, and a sense of purpose when leadership begins to feel empty or misaligned.
