It’s the single most common sentence in my work, and it almost always arrives with an apology attached.
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t know what I want.”
It gets said by people who are extremely capable at knowing things. People who make difficult calls at work every day, who run teams and budgets, who could tell you in detail what their organisation should do differently. And then you turn the question around to them, to their own life, and they go blank, and then they get embarrassed about going blank.
If that’s you, I want to take the shame out of it first, because the shame is doing more damage than the not knowing.
It isn’t a planning problem
The instinctive response, when you can’t answer a question, is to get better information. So people research. They read about career changes, they take the free personality tests, they make lists of pros and cons, they look at job boards to see what’s out there, they ask friends what they think would suit them.
None of it works, and then they conclude they must be uniquely indecisive.
Here’s why it doesn’t work. “What do I want?” is not a question about the outside world. No amount of information about available jobs will answer it, because the missing piece isn’t out there in the market, it’s in you, and it’s been buried.
How it got buried
From very early on, we’re shaped by the people around us. You work out what your parents are proud of. You notice what gets rewarded at school, what your friends treat as impressive, what “doing well” looks like in the particular world you happen to be standing in. And you adjust. Everyone does, it’s not a character flaw, it’s how humans work, it’s how we survive.
Then you pick a field, and something narrower happens. If you go into finance, everyone around you is in finance. If you go into tech, same. Your sense of what’s possible shrinks to what’s visible inside that room, and your definition of success gets calibrated entirely against the people in it. Higher up, bigger team, better title, more money. Not because you sat down and decided those were your values, but because that was the scoreboard in the room you happened to be in.
Do that for fifteen or twenty years, performing a slightly adjusted version of yourself to fit each new context, and something predictable happens. The performance becomes automatic. And the person underneath it, the one who was supposed to be doing the wanting, gets very quiet.
So when you finally ask yourself what you want, you’re asking a question of someone you haven’t spoken to properly in two decades. Of course there’s no answer. It isn’t that you’re confused. It’s that you’ve lost the thread back to yourself, and that’s a completely different problem with a completely different solution.
The three things that are actually going on
When somebody tells me they don’t know what they want, it’s usually one of three things underneath, and they need different handling.
One: you genuinely can’t hear yourself. You’ve been so busy for so long, running at capacity, that there’s no bandwidth left for a question this big. Every time you try to think about it your brain hands you the sensible answer, the one that requires nothing of you, and you feel nothing about it. This is the most common one.
Two: you know, and you don’t like the answer. This is more common than people admit. Some part of you knows exactly what you’d rather be doing, and it’s smaller, or quieter, or sideways, or would mean admitting that a chunk of the last decade was spent climbing something you didn’t want to be at the top of. So you file it under “not realistic” and go back to saying you don’t know. Saying you don’t know is much more comfortable than saying you do and you’re scared.
Three: you’ve never had permission to want anything specific. Some people have spent their entire lives being useful to other people’s expectations, and the muscle for wanting things has simply never been developed. Ask them what they’d like for their birthday and they struggle. This one takes the longest and it’s often the most transformative.
What actually helps
Stop looking outward. Close the job boards. Genuinely. Looking at roles before you know what you’re looking for is how people end up applying for a slightly different version of the job they already have, and being unhappy again eighteen months later.
Get the noise down first. You cannot answer a question this significant in the ten minutes between meetings. It needs proper space, ideally not in front of a screen, ideally long enough that the first forty minutes of mental admin can drain out. Whatever gets you calm, walking, swimming, meditation, sitting somewhere with a pen and no phone, do that first. The honest answers only show up once the urgent ones have stopped shouting.
Look backwards for evidence, not forwards for options. You don’t need to imagine a future you can’t see. You need to examine the past you’ve already lived. When in the last three years did you lose track of time? When did you feel most competent? Which meeting do you consistently look forward to and which one do you reschedule? What did you love about your job in year one that you no longer get? Your history is full of data about how you’re wired, and almost nobody reads it.
Ask where your definition of success came from. Write down what “doing well” means to you. Then, next to each item, write down who taught you that. Some of it will genuinely be yours. A surprising amount will belong to a parent, a first manager, or a peer group you left behind years ago.
Separate the four problems. “I’m unhappy at work” is nearly always a mix of the work itself, the people and culture, the pace and the load, and the purpose of the organisation. Those have four different solutions, from a conversation with your manager to leaving your sector entirely. Diagnose before you prescribe.
Then do the hardest part: accept it. Insight is not change. When you find out what you actually want, and it doesn’t match the identity you’ve carefully built, there’s grief in that, and there’s often shame. You have to make peace with who you actually are rather than who you thought you were supposed to be. That’s where the real work sits, and it’s the part most career advice skips entirely because it isn’t tidy.
You don’t need certainty, you need a direction and a next step
One last thing, because it matters.
People often wait to feel certain before they move, and certainty is not what’s on offer. What’s on offer is knowing enough about yourself to make the next decision deliberately rather than by default. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You don’t need to know what you’re doing in 2035, you need to stop taking the next reasonable step just because it’s the one in front of you.
If you’d like a structured version of all of this, I’m running The Autumn Career Reset on Saturday 19 September in Den Haag (The Hague). A full day, capped at 15 people. The morning is about quieting the noise, with meditation and energy work led by Mel Hillyard, and the afternoon is where we do the digging and build your written plan. There’s two months of follow-up afterwards so it doesn’t stay theoretical.
Early bird is EUR 95 until 12 September, then EUR 145. Details here: alicegraves.com/the-autumn-career-reset
If a room of people isn’t your thing, the same work happens one to one and you can just message me and ask about it. The day is one way in, not the only one.