What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do With Your Life

2. At Pearl Lemon (my marketing agency) we have a placement programme where we work with young people who are often coming to Pearl Lemon with it being their first place of work. And they’re here for an experience – they’re here to figure out what it is they want to do with their life. What’s interesting though – is that it’s not JUST those who are fresh out of college that are joining the Pearl Lemon Placement programme – it’s also experienced folks who are looking for a career change. So with all of this in mind – I wanted to offer my insights, having had 23+ jobs, multiple careers and the like – what you should do when you don’t know what to do with your life:

3. KNOW THAT IT’S COMPLETELY NORMAL Maybe you look around at other people and they seem to ‘have it all together’ and know exactly what they want. A couple of things to keep in mind: ● Knowing what you want and just DOING something with your life are very different things Many people DO things with their lives – knowing what you want is much more challenging. ●

4. BE COMFORTABLE WITH THE UNKNOWN Part of figuring out what you want to do with your life – after getting comfortable with the idea that it’s ok to not knowing What to do with your life. Is that in order to figure out what you should do with your life then – you need to be comfortable with the unknown – with experimentation…with just trying things out? It’s the only way to figure out what you should do – by exploring that which you yet do not know!

5. TAKE OPPORTUNITIES ARE THEY ARE PRESENTED TO YOU Opportunities to do things, opportunities to try things out. It’s important that you get into the habit of saying ‘yes’. Because there is typically no limit on the things you could try. TRY THINGS OUT This is why it’s important to start trying things. Whether it’s for an hour or a day, week, month or longer. To begin to get closer to figuring out what you want to do with your time, you’re basically going to need to just try some stuff out.

6. MONEY IS SECONDARY TO EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION Money is actually easy to acquire after you develop excellence. If you’re too focused on acquiring income – often time you won’t get the real experiences you’re after. e.g maybe you want to shadow me if you’re thinking about becoming a digital marketing agency owner? Or least see what that involves If you asked me to pay you to ‘help out’ – well I have my team already in place – and actually – none of them are directly ‘shadowing me’ – I’m leading from the front myself more or less. So to get the experience you want if you were to ‘shadow me’ – the best way to do it – is to ask to do it for free.

8. FOCUS ON THE PROCESS When you start acquiring experience – don’t worry so much about having an ‘exact’ step-by-step plan. Focus more instead on skill acquisition. As you acquire more skills and try more things – an outcome usually does present itself. You can combine what you’re learning with what you already know and maybe discover an opportunity where your skills and enjoyment meet in a way you can build a living from. And as you acquire more and more experience and focus on getting good at the process – I promise you that this outcome will materialise.

10. TALK TO A CAREERS EXPERT Amongst people you can ask – you’ll also find career experts. Whether choosing to volunteer, or shadow someone – or even trying to get a sense of possible careers. Well – a careers coach will be an ideal person to speak to. They’ll have most likely had to deal with this question in its many forms over the years and will be well placed to give you some solid suggestions about how to figure out what to do with your life

11. ACCEPT THE OUTCOME And this is important to understand and then keep moving forward. You may have an idea of something you want to do with your life. KNOW IT’S OK TO FAIL This is a mindset that is critical to finding your life’s passion. Failure is perfectly fine when trying to find a fruitful endeavor. Finding your purpose, passion, or even interest will involve a lot of missteps along the way. This is where having a powerful mindset comes into play – because we can all recover from failure. In fact, failure is our greatest teacher.

13. EXPLORE WHAT YOU ALREADY ENJOY DOING? It may be the case then when figuring out what you want to do with your life – you might already be doing it! It could just be the case that that ‘thing’ is something that’s at the partitions or edges of your life. Perhaps a hobby, or something you do less frequently that you really enjoy. CAN YOU MAKE MONEY FROM SOMETHING YOU ALREADY LOVE? This is an important consideration – which we briefly touched upon when we said – is there something in your life that you already enjoy doing? And if there is – is that something you can make money doing? If you’re not sure – well talk to your life coach or do some research and see if someone in that space IS making money doing just that very thing!

14. WHAT HABITS DO I NEED TO CHANGE? This I think is an important part of your journey. If you have destructive habits – whether it’s substance abuse, sleep-rise habits, junk food, avoiding responsibility… There can be many versions of this – it’s worth giving consideration to what you can work upon to remove/resolve to give you a better chance of being able to make clear-sighted decisions.

15. FIND SOMEONE WHO HAS WALKED THE PATH YOU’RE EXPLORING Once you’ve hit upon a path that you wish to explore – why not reach out to someone whose already on that same journey? Find out what they make of it, what their experiences have been – and how that can potentially help you drive forward!

16. FINAL THOUGHTS Figuring out what you want to do with your life is no small thing. It’s a big decision that involves lots of options. Hopefully, this guide provides you with something of a roadmap for how you can drive your life forward in a way that’ll help you find how you wish to spend your time!