The Road Trip

Imagine you’re sitting in a car, wanting to take a road trip to the destination of your dreams.

But the following things are true:

1. You’re sitting in the passenger seat
2. You don’t know how a car works
3. You don’t know where you want to end up
4. You don’t know how to read road signs
5. You are alone in the car
6. There’s no gas in the tank
7. The car is packed completely full of other people’s arbitrary junk

The odds of getting to your dream destination that way are, obviously, pretty low.

But this is exactly how most of us approach planning our lives and careers:

1. We wait for an authority figure, luck, or divine intervention to decide for us
2. We don’t pay attention to how our bodies, hearts, and minds actually work
3. We don’t know what the dream destination even is
4. We ignore signals about what’s working or not until it’s too late
5. We try to do it all by ourselves
6. We don’t take time to rest and recharge
7. We fill up on other people’s expectations and needs instead of making room for our own

And we’re consistently surprised that this doesn’t yield a fulfilling life. 

(Then we beat ourselves up for it, because someone told us that can be used as a motivational substitute instead of filling up the gas tank.)

If you’re not loving your job/life at the moment, which of those factors are most true for you? 

What ones would you want to tackle first to start to make change?