Feeling lost? Start here.

I have been talking about starting to write on the topic of self-improvement for about five years now. Granted, I have thought about it in many different forms. First, it was a website, then a blog, and now a newsletter. I have taken steps to create it, then stopped, often for months at a time.

The resistance I feel toward sitting down and writing is quite remarkable, yet I know that it’s important work that I must do. The strange thing is, when I sit down and get past staring at the screen, words spill out onto the page and something even more remarkable happens…I begin to feel energised. I find it’s the same for yoga, meditation and journaling but sadly not for cooking (although I am desperate to fall in love with it). The question is if it feels good when I do it, why do I feel such resistance to it in the first instance?

The truth is, I’m a perfectionist, a chronic over-thinker and a procrastinator (which I am told is, in fact, a symptom of perfectionism). In the context of my newsletter, which is called Lost x Found, this means that I want everything I publish to be purposeful and flawless. So then I started to think about what I needed to do; there’s so much to research, learn, explore, and discover. So much that it felt overwhelming. That’s when the excitement turned into fear; how will I get it all done? How will I keep it up? Then fear turned into resistance; I need to research that topic more before I write about it; it doesn’t make sense to write about this until you have written about that; you have that big project coming up so start after that.

The irony is that this is exactly the reason I wanted to start Lost x Found in the first place. Since my mid-twenties, I have found that almost everyone I know is going through some sort of existential crisis, often involving questions about purpose and meaning, underpinned by a feeling of “what the hell am I meant to be doing with my life?”. It doesn’t start like that, of course. Many of us enter our twenties feeling optimistic, ambitious and inspired. We create these expectations of what our lives should look like, and then as we start adulting we realise there is more to figure out than we ever imagined or prepared ourselves for. It starts to feel overwhelming and our initial excitement turns into fear.

Do I work for love or money? Do I follow my heart or head? Do I live for the present or plan for the future? Do I stay single and hold out for the perfect relationship, or will this do? We start crumbling under the pressure to make the right decision, and emotionally punish ourselves when we appear to have made the wrong one. To make matters worse, everyone around us seems to be getting it right. We scroll through our feeds and see people our age who are doing so much more than us, achieving so much more than us, looking healthier than us, and clearly happier than us. What the hell are we doing wrong?

The answer is everything and nothing at all. The process of trying to work out which path is right is an important one, but looking outwards to others is not.

Psychiatrist and author of the must-read book, The Road Less Traveled, Dr Scott Peck sums it up perfectly…

“Life is complex. Each one of us must make his own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong for another. The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.”

So if there is no manual, no formula, no signposts, then where the hell do we start?

We start with ourselves. We start with introspection and reflection because we need to cultivate self-understanding, self-comprehension and self-awareness to make decisions. It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what you want, need or what makes you feel good. The problem most of us face in our young adult lives is that we have no idea what those things are. What cripples us isn’t the process of making a choice, it’s the fear of making the wrong one.

Aristotle said “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” and that’s why the foundational practice for anyone who wants to better navigate life is self-reflection. Self-reflection is looking at moments in your life and recognising how you feel in them in (almost) real time. It’s not goal-setting and thinking about what you believe will make you happy in the future. It’s not deep-diving into your past to examine what happened back then to make you unhappy now. That’s not to say there’s no place for these things, just that your conclusions might be off the mark if you don’t know who you are or what you truly want.

I have been following a weekly practice for over five years, a practice that has helped me to change my ambitions, aspirations, habits and lifestyle. When I left university, I couldn’t wait to make money. I wanted to be a high-powered executive working in a big company, living in a modern city apartment, wearing a uniform of VB dresses and Christian Louboutin shoes.

Over the next decade, my weekly practice would reveal to me that growth and integrity are more important to me than status and power. I’d learn that I value freedom and flexibility more than stability and security and that the quality of my mental health is more important than the size of my paycheque. I now find it much easier when it comes to making career-related decisions. It’s much easier to decide whether to stay in a job or take it in the first place.

Now, when I look back at the stacks of notebooks that I have used over the years, containing all the insights, thoughts, feelings and fears I have taken note of, I realise something. It’s all just data.

Companies are spending millions of dollars on getting data about you, what you like and what interests you so that they can tell you what you need, what you want and what your life should look like. The thing is, only you have access to the most useful data there is; how you feel at any given moment. Herein lie the insights that begin to answer those questions.

You can find my reflection guide here.

It’s a weekly practice that you can start today with nothing but a pen, paper and an hour. It’s a simple method of introspection that guides you to reflect on moments in your week and how they felt. The practice helps you to gather data on yourself so that ultimately you can know yourself better. It’s not about judging what you should or shouldn’t have done last week, or even whether what happened was good or bad; you’re just recognising how it made you feel and then taking action based on what you learn. As Maya Angelou reflected,

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

The beauty of this reflective practice is that it is ongoing. It’s not a 12-step program or a roadmap to your perfect self. You don’t complete the process, figure everything out and then get on with life. It’s a practice, habit, hobby; an act of self-care. It’s like working out, eating healthily, drinking green smoothies or reading books. You intend to do them indefinitely but, of course, you’ll drop in and out.

It’s also rooted in the present, which means what you learn will change and even contradict what you thought you knew before. You will change and grow, and the direction that is right for you at this junction in life, won’t necessarily be right for you at the next one.

When I think about this time in our lives, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about improving ourselves merely for the sake of improving. It’s not so we never make the wrong choices or go to the wrong places, but so that when we do, we have the awareness to know it’s not serving us. It’s so we can make shifts today, not in ten years when we wake up and realise we’ve spent the best part of our life moving towards something that would never make us happy.

And make no mistake, you will change your mind. Despite five years of procrastinating, I will inevitably change stance on some of the things I write about in my newsletters. But right now, this is what I know.

The best thing we can all do is commit to understanding the version of ourselves that we are today so that we feel better equipped to navigate the “rocky path through the wilderness” and don’t wake up someday in our forties or fifties wondering at what point we lost our way.