When you know something needs to change, but you don't know where to begin

I have been thinking about a particular kind of stuckness that many of my clients complain about, and that I have experienced far too many times in my own life.

It is not the kind where you don't know what the problem is, but quite the opposite. In fact, sometimes people can explain their situation remarkably well and analyse the causes of it and how they feel about it. They know how they got there, the whole history, and they know what’s not working for them. They may even recognise that the same patterns keep appearing in their life again and again, and they know what they don't want to continue doing.

But then comes the much harder question: what instead of what is now?

This was one of the many things that made me interested in using futures methods in my work with people. A year ago I started wondering what would happen if we used them with the questions people bring into therapy and into periods of change in their lives. Especially as we are, at times, very bad at really opening up options and thinking outside the box.

Because knowing why something happened and knowing how you are feeling are very different from thinking about what could happen next.

If I have spent 10 to 20 years building a career that I no longer want, or that no longer offers employment, then understanding why this is may be useful. But it doesn't tell me what else I could do and what would work best for me, especially if I face the situation in a panic. Or if I have had a burnout and I am stuck at home, afraid of making a move, knowing all my fears and why something does not work for me is still far away from seeing what could work for me.

On a relationship level, one can understand that a relationship has reached a point where something has to change and, of course, understanding its history matters. But there is still another question sitting there, and that is: what are the actual possible futures from here, and can I and can we see them?

And unfortunately, I don't think we are particularly good at that question.

The futures we can see from where we are now

When we are worried, tired or stuck, the future can start looking very small. We tend to see only a handful of options, and often not very nice ones, and they come back with obstacles and fears. And then we sit alone at home and try to choose between them. Stay or leave. Carry on or start again. Accept this or risk that. Friends and family may try to help, and often can offer an insight or two, but equally they may have their own interests and their own experiences, which might then confuse us further.

But those are rarely all the possible futures. They are the ones we can see from where we happen to be standing now.

Let me give an example.

I worked with a woman in her fifties who had had an impressive, though somewhat scattered, career that had taken her to different countries and through different kinds of work. At one point she had also gone back to university to change direction professionally. Life and family had intervened, however, and the degree had remained unfinished while she continued working.

Then the work stopped. She had also had a burnout and had been unemployed for a long time. By the time we started working together, money was running out, she had to take up loans, and the stress was spilling into every area of her life.

What was interesting was that she did not come to me without an idea of what she wanted. Quite the opposite. She was convinced that there was one particular job, in one particular field, that would finally put things right. She saw it as her dream job and believed she needed to keep trying until she got there.

But there were problems with that future too.

The field had changed and the opportunities were not what they had once been. Her own life had changed as well. She had young children, had been through a burnout and was trying to build a working life that would actually be sustainable. And, most importantly, was she really the person for that role, or had it just been an idea of hers that, in reality, might not work for her at all?

So rather than concentrating only on how to get the job she had already decided she wanted, we began looking more widely.

We looked at what was happening in the field she wanted to enter and what it might realistically look like in the future. We looked at her previous work, her skills and the different directions they could lead. We also looked at the patterns that had followed her through working life: how much she took on, how little space there was for her own interests and self-care, and how work and personal life repeatedly spilled into one another.

Gradually, the future became less fixed.

One thing became very clear. If she continued applying for jobs, it might take a very long time for her to get one. And the stress of it, and of not earning, had already been getting the better of her for months. She also did not want to do just any job, as she still had a passion for her field.

After we opened up her Futures Wheels, she was quite surprised by what she found – the causes and effects, and what connected to what. And within a few weeks she had made her choice to finish her degree, as this really mattered to her, and leaving it hanging was itself keeping something open in her mind. So she made the decision to focus fully on finishing her studies.

What happened next was not what she had originally imagined. She did not apply for the job she had been calling her dream job, but she did apply for something else that genuinely interested her. She also widened the geographical area she was considering and thought that she could work remotely.

And she reconsidered another assumption. Until then, the idea had largely been to return to full-time work. But with two young children and everything that had happened, she began to ask herself whether full-time work was actually the right future at that particular point in her life.

So she applied for a part-time position. And … she got it! It was her first job in two years.

What I find important about this case is not that futures work somehow produced a job, as of course it didn't. But she now had a realistic insight into different possible futures, and also into what had kept her stuck. She had a different narrative as well, and all these different elements together made a huge change in her life.

The future became larger

At the beginning, there was essentially one acceptable future in her mind, and everything depended on whether she could make that future happen. By the end, she had begun to see several different ways in which work, family, place, education and her own wellbeing could fit together.

Her future had become wider, larger in many ways. The future was not just work, but her full life. And she had also changed her reality in many other ways as she started to have real decisions about her relationship with her spouse, how she lived and how she wanted to live her very own life. Work was no longer an obsession for her, but something she did to live the life she wanted to create for herself.