Where to Look for Clues to Find Your Life Path
Written by Ruth Hutchins, Career Awakening Coach
Ruth Hutchins is more than a career coach with 30 years of career experience and a unique holistic approach, helping people find clarity and direction. She is the founder of Creating Healthy Careers, author of Career Awakening: How to Align Your Career With Your Soul Purpose, and creator of the Career Awakening methodology.
People search for their life path like it’s this hidden path that they need to find, when the truth is, they’re already walking it. The expectation that we should somehow find our life path can be paralysing. Which way should I go? What am I meant to be doing? What if I choose the wrong thing?
It creates the belief that the answer is somewhere ahead of us, and that we need complete clarity before we can take the next step. But if you’re looking forward to finding that elusive path, you may be looking in the wrong direction.
Life leaves us clues, and often those clues are behind us. So that’s where we need to look, back through our lives. Steve Jobs famously said we can only connect the dots of our lives by looking backward.
I’ll give you an example of how I joined the dots in my own life, moving from a 20+ year recruitment career, where I couldn’t imagine what else I could do, to eventually stepping into my coaching business.
Life nudges you onto your path
I enjoyed being in the recruitment industry, but the time came when I knew I needed to do more, and I felt something was missing. I was applying for jobs but not getting anywhere, and wondered what I was meant to be doing with my life.
I always had a feeling that I wanted to start my own business, but not in recruitment, which led me to wonder, what’s next? I’d played around with a business concept for seven years and even developed a website back in the day, when you had to pay a significant amount for one. But I never commercialised the business or fully committed to it.
However, when you are not on your path in life, you will get little nudges to help you onto it. The nudges start off small, but if you ignore them, they become a push and then a powerful kick, which is not pleasant.
I knew something needed to change, but I repeatedly chose the ‘safer’ option. The pattern kept repeating, and eventually I recognised that life was trying to redirect me. But the fact that I wasn’t taking action to transition my career into the business I had been thinking about was also a sign that my heart wasn’t in it. So I immersed myself in the world of personal development to start getting some clarity.
The bus stop conversation
In a few of the courses I did, we spent time looking at the key influencers and influential experiences in our lives to see how they’d shaped us, which I’ll run you through shortly.
Years later, I read Sue Morter’s book The Energy Codes and was fascinated by her ‘bus stop conversation’ theory, which I’ll briefly touch on here. You don’t need to share the spiritual premise behind it, simply take on the insightful perspective it provides.
Imagine that before you entered this world, you were sitting at a bus stop, waiting for your journey to begin. You were thinking about what you’d like to learn or develop this time around and started saying to the others at the bus stop, “This time I want a level 10 experience in acceptance and forgiveness. Who’s going to help me?”
Then someone at the bus stop says, “I will.” Off you both go on your journey without knowing how it’s going to happen. Then one day, you experience a challenge in your life, and it’s the person from the bus stop who has come to give you an experience to help you learn how to accept and forgive.
Wow, how’s that for a reframe! We can use the bus stop conversation to explore why we might have invited a particular experience into our lives, and what we were being asked to learn or develop through it.
This was a profound exercise that helped me see my father, and what he’d brought into my life, from a whole new perspective.
How your early experiences can reveal your life path
Let me paint a picture of how Creating Healthy Careers came to be. My dad used to be quite high up in the police force in England, and when our family moved to Australia, he couldn’t move across within the force at the same level. He couldn’t afford to support a family of five on a starting salary, so he had to look for a new job.
As he was good at accounting, he took a position in an accounts department, which greatly impacted his happiness and our home life.
As a young child, I simply used to ask, “Why can’t he be happy at work?” Dad would suppress his frustration at work, but inevitably some of it came home with him. We all experienced that side of him, which ultimately affected our family.
So I grew up with a constant reminder of how important it is to be happy in your career. My first dot was Dad's lesson that you need to be happy in your career, no matter what you’re doing. Otherwise, it can negatively affect you, your happiness, your relationships, your family, your health, and your self-worth.
All of a sudden, I realised that a person I had always seen through a negative lens had been in my life as a key influencer in shaping my life path and purpose.
In that moment, I was able to let go of years of anger towards my father and develop a sense of gratitude for him, understanding that he’d sacrificed having a loving relationship with his daughter in order to provide me with such a strong pathway in life.
Reflecting on your life’s experiences and challenges through the lens of “What is the learning that I need to gain from this?” or “Why would I have asked for or invited this experience into my life?” can not only give you a newfound appreciation and sense of gratitude for what you have experienced and help you stop the blame game, but also help you start to paint a picture of the skills, knowledge and wisdom you have to share with the world.
When you stop and consider how life has orchestrated all the people and experiences to bring you what you need, you can no longer ignore your path. After all, who are you to get in the way of what you are here to bring into the world?
The questions to ask yourself
The questions are simple, but finding the answers may take you some time. Reflect on these:
Who were the three biggest influencers early in your life, and what did they teach you?
What experiences, both painful and positive, shaped the person you became?
What patterns or themes have kept repeating throughout your life?
What have people consistently come to you for help, advice, or perspective on?
What have your hardest experiences taught you that could now be valuable to someone else?
Then stand back and look at all of your answers together. Don’t analyse each clue in isolation. Look for the threads running through them.
Your life path may not reveal itself as one dramatic moment of clarity. More often, it emerges as you begin recognising the patterns that have been there all along.
If you’re at a point in life where you know there’s more for you, but you’re struggling to see what comes next, my Life Path Program helps you uncover the clues, patterns and experiences that can help you understand what life may be showing you about your path.
Brainz readers can get 50% off the Self-Paced Life Path Program using the code "Brainz" at checkout.
Read more from Ruth Hutchins
Ruth Hutchins, Career Awakening Coach
Ruth Hutchins is a Career and Life Path Coach with 30 years' experience spanning recruitment, career development and coaching. She helps people make sense of the experiences, turning points and challenges that have shaped them, uncovering the clues that reveal who they are and where they're called next. Ruth believes even our hardest chapters contain gold, pointing us toward our values, strengths and direction. Through her holistic approach, she helps clients reconnect with themselves and build a career and life that feels genuinely their own.
