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Tool 11 · Develop yourself
What does this part of my life require now?
A guided 25 to 35 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Not a life stage quiz. A conversation that works out what is actually happening, and whether it needs changing at all.
Sometimes your life changes before you change your mind about who you are.
Not every uncomfortable period is telling you to leave. Some of them are just asking you to pay attention.
The dramatic answer is not always the true one. Occasionally it is, and that is a finding too.
What you'll look at
- 01Why you opened this today
- 02What has changed recently, even if it seems unrelated
- 03Something that used to give you energy and no longer does
- 04Where you are measuring yourself against someone else
A note from Mark
I have watched a lot of people decide they needed a completely new life when what they actually needed was a fortnight off and one difficult conversation.
I have also watched people spend years telling themselves they were just tired, when something in them had genuinely finished with the thing they were doing.
From the inside, those two feel almost identical. That is the whole problem. The language available to us is dramatic, so a quiet dissatisfaction gets promoted to a crisis, and a real ending gets demoted to a bad patch.
Read my full view ↓
The other thing I notice is how much of it is borrowed. People arrive convinced they are behind, and when you ask behind what, it turns out to be a schedule nobody ever agreed to, usually assembled from three friends and a version of their father's career.
What I would want from this is not a new plan. It is an accurate reading of where you actually are, and then the smallest sensible thing you could do to find out whether you are right.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
The stage you are actually in
02
What it requires
03
What it does not require
04
What to protect while it changes
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01Why you came here
- 02The stage you appear to be in
- 03The evidence
- 04What appears to be ending
- 05What appears to be emerging
- 06What this stage requires from you
- 07What it does not require
- 08What you may be carrying forward that no longer fits
- 09Where the expectation came from
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What is already working and should be protected
- 12What remains uncertain
- 13What to do next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
A plain description of the stage you appear to be in, from the evidence rather than your age.
02 · Test it
Try a small, reversible version of the thing you think you want. A week of it, a project, an evening a fortnight. What you learn by doing it will beat another month of thinking about it.
See more ↓
Before you act on it
Nothing here is a reason to resign, end a relationship, move country or spend money you cannot lose. An exercise can tell you what to test. It cannot tell you what to risk.
If the conclusion was that you are depleted rather than in transition, treat that as a real result. The direction question is still worth asking, but it gives a much better answer once you are rested.
What I would do
- 01
Describe what is happening now before deciding what it means. The interpretation usually arrives first and it is usually borrowed.
- 02
Separate what has ended from what has begun. They are not always both present, and pretending otherwise forces a decision too early.
- 03
Work out where the expectation came from. Family, a peer group, an industry, an earlier version of yourself or a decision you actually made.
- 04
Test tiredness against direction. If it lifts when the load lifts, it was not a life change.
- 05
Then ask what this period actually requires, which is often far less dramatic than what you were preparing to do.
Test it
- 01
Take a proper break before making any decision you cannot reverse. If the flatness lifts, you had a load problem rather than a life problem.
- 02
For a month, note the moments you were genuinely absorbed in something. Three or four entries will tell you more about the emerging thing than any amount of reflection.
- 03
Write down what you assume you should have achieved by now, then next to it the name of the person or place that assumption came from.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you need to change something significant. Sometimes that is right. Often the evidence points somewhere less exciting and more useful. This is not reinvention, you are exhausted. This is not stagnation, you are consolidating. This is not failure, the objective changed while you were still working to the old one. You do not need a new direction, you need to finish what you started. You do not need more ambition, you need fewer competing ones. You do not need to leave, you need to change how you take part. You are not behind, you are using somebody else's timetable. You are not winding down, you have finally got the room to build. And occasionally the thing you assumed was ending is the thing that deserves recommitting to.
Think about this
- Something that still works perfectly well and has stopped meaning anything.
- The last thing that changed, including the one that seemed too small to count.
- What people around you assume you still want.
- Whose timetable you are actually measuring yourself against.
- Whether the thing you are calling a transition might be exhaustion, boredom or one conversation you have been avoiding.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
READ · BOOK
Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes
William Bridges
Read this if something has already ended and you are embarrassed that you still have no idea what comes next.
Read more ↗
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READ · BOOK
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Read this if you have been reflecting on the same possible change for two years and have never once tried a small version of it.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
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We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes
William Bridges
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Life Is in the Transitions
Bruce Feiler
See the thinking ↓
Book
Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes
William Bridges
Bridges separates change, which is the external event, from transition, which is the slower internal business of letting go of who you were while it happens. His most useful claim is that the empty middle stretch is not a failure to move on. It is the part of the process where the next thing actually gets worked out, and rushing it usually produces a decision you reverse later.
Book
Working Identity
Herminia Ibarra
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.
Book
Life Is in the Transitions
Bruce Feiler
Built on hundreds of life-story interviews, and useful mainly for one finding: disruption is far more frequent than the tidy three-act version of a life allows for, and the big ones do not arrive on schedule. It is a corrective to the idea that you are either on track or in crisis.
Book
The Burnout Challenge
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted. The two are easy to confuse. The remedies are not remotely the same.
Article
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory
Laura Carstensen
Why the relationships and goals we prioritise change as our sense of time changes. The finding worth having is that this tracks how much time a person believes is left rather than how old they are, which is why a shortened horizon at thirty produces the same narrowing as one at seventy.