😶‍🌫️ How to take action when you don’t know what’s next?

[0:45] Hi there. How are things going in your world? In the past few weeks in conversation with other business friends and in my head too, I have been noticing a thing coming up often. Then I had a conversation with a dear mentor who shared that she believes that I’m very good at helping people actually take action.

[1:09] And these two themes started jumping and clashing in my thoughts and I, you know, started asking myself some questions. So the first theme is change. You know, I have been feeling that many of us are at the end of some kind of cycle in our work and maybe in our lives too and that a new cycle is coming. And as I shared with my therapist a couple of sessions ago, I feel like we can sense, we can feel this change coming, that we are probably craving it, but we don’t know yet, what’s coming up or what we are about to leave behind. The second theme, which I kind of spoiled already, is taking action, which is also more nuanced than we might usually think, right? So here’s how they clashed in my head. I started thinking that in this kind of weird, limbo-like situation where you are at the end of a cycle but don’t know what’s coming next, it feels hard to take action. Because you don’t really know what you are going to take action toward or which direction you want to take, right?

[2:28] This made me ask myself a lot of questions because I usually think that when you take action, it’s because you have a clear direction or vision you want to move toward. You don’t know what the path between where you are right now and where you want to get is going to be. But usually the vision, the place you want to get to is pretty clear. So how do you get unstuck and take action when you have almost no idea of where you want to go?

[3:00] Now, allow me to digress here before I get to the point, because I want to share something that felt really insightful and relevant to what we are talking about today. So last Saturday, my organizing collective hosted a meeting to discuss what we think and how we feel about prison abolition, which is a very complex topic, a very layered one, right? One that, you know, stirs up a lot of potentially conflicting emotions and thoughts in each of us. It’s something that’s very interesting to discuss and very hard to discuss at the same time.

[3:43] So what I noticed throughout the discussion was that almost all of us, and I’m not saying this with judgment, but just as an observation, almost all of us wanted to feel like we already had an alternative way of doing things, like a different solution ready. We were like, yes, we know that the prison system doesn’t work. We know that we theoretically agree with prison abolition and the idea of transformative justice, but we don’t know how we can replace the current system with the new one. And, you know, as guests in our meeting, there were people from another collective actively working on this topic and what I noticed was that many people asked them questions looking for solutions.

[4:34] This made me realize that we are so used to delegating our agency to other systems that decide for us that we tend to delegate the responsibility of finding our own solutions too. We tend to lose the ability to imagine new solutions. We tend to lose the ability to see that each solution depends on its context, so they can be very different from each other. But when we want to do things differently, we need to invent our own way. And to do this, we cannot delegate to others. We need to be able to imagine, to reclaim our agency, our power, our responsibility. And we need to ask questions, questions that open portals rather than looking for solutions. So I felt deeply inspired when one of the people quoted the Mexican Zapatista movement, which says, Asking we walk. That’s a saying that has its origins in indigenous philosophy, and it means that while we walk, we ask questions because we don’t know what we’ll find ahead on the path. So we’ll make decisions while we walk it.

[5:52] Those kinds of questions are portals because they don’t assume, they don’t look for quick fixes or solutions. They listen, they notice, they integrate. They are about asking ourselves and each other as a community to really understand what we want to create. And then that same person who quoted that saying also said, and this felt so relieving, We are going to try, and we know that 95% of the time we are going to fail, but still we are going to try to change things. All this digression to make this point. When we don’t know what’s coming next, we can try to step forward to take action, despite knowing that we might fail. Because when we try, we reclaim our agency, our responsibility, our ability to imagine, and our ability to make decisions that take action that will allow us to create something different, something aligned, to create our own map, as we say here, right? So when we are in a forest with a lot of trees and we don’t see the way out, we can still take action because we have all the tools to do that. We can ground and center ourselves in our inner wisdom and use our personal compass to orient our path, our way, our steps.

[7:18] So, let’s try using the personal compass together. If you’ve been asking yourself, what’s my next step, and hearing, I don’t know, as a reply, take a moment to tune in. Notice what’s coming up for you What feels alive in you and your work Or maybe what feels off, Now, try and sort out what came up for you What truly matters there What can help What might be getting in the way, And now, ask yourself what your next step is. Regardless of whether you know or do not know what your direction is, commit to a tiny next step, a tiny experiment, a tiny exploration. See what happens and go from there. And if you get lost, remember that you can keep asking questions and using your personal compass to find your way.

[8:17] Also, as I mentioned earlier, taking action is more nuanced than we might usually think. So sometimes your next step can be more about being than doing, or more about sitting still rather than moving forward. This kind of nuance came up during the September Compass Circle I hosted last week. It was super fun and super interesting seeing how each person who joined contributed so beautifully to the conversation, bringing up different facets of a common thread. So I would love to have you there too at the October Compass Circle, which, by the way, if you don’t know, is a free Zoom gathering on Fridays around the new moon, where we use an Oracle spread to help you clarify what you want to create in the new cycle of your work, what can help you take action and what your next step is. And then we share in the circle to get even more insights and inspiration. The next one is on October 9th at 11 a.m. Central Time. You will find the link and the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you there.

[9:33] Okay, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. See you at the next episode.