Don’t Panic! - 4 Steps to Find Yourself and Your Path

You want to do something with your life! You are all fired up and ready to go to… ready to go to… go… somewhere.

You look around and only see people who know exactly where they want to go, what to do, and who they are. You probably looked at someone like me. Someone who had planned their entire life at fourteen and followed that plan to the best of her ability (spoiler alert: I ditched the plan).

The funny thing is that the people you are looking at have most definitely or had definitely questioned what the heck was going on in their lives.

Don’t fret if you don’t know where you are going at the moment or who you are yet. At least you are trying to figure out your authentic path now rather than later.

Here are some tips to light your candle on your journey:

Step #1 — Don’t Beat Yourself Up

Everyone questions where they are going in life and who they are at some point. It is a rite of passage. The phenomenon happens to people from many different stages of life and even multiple times with one person.

It is natural to try to figure these things out. It is natural not to know everything. So, please don’t be hard on yourself. It is entirely possible that the people you know who seem like they have it all together, don’t actually have it all together.

For example, myself.

I decided that I wanted to be a pediatric healthcare physician as a teenager. I wanted to get married young and have a good amount of kids. I knew where I wanted to go and how I was going to get there. Everyone knew me as the kid who had it all figured out.

My perfectly curated life plan crumbled to pieces in a single experience. I spent a day volunteering at my “desired” job and had an epiphany.

The first being that I was a total introvert and the work setting drained me. The second being that I didn’t like kids that much.

It had such an effect on me that I threw my life plan away and said no to the entire healthcare industry. I, for the first time in my life, didn’t know where I was going.

Like in the beginning part of this section, I advise you to not be hard on yourself. See it as natural and keep calm. If you panic like I did, you won’t be in the right state to get the clarity you need.

Step # 2 — Quality Self-Discovery Time

After I calmed down and decided to be kind to myself, I began to shift inward to find where I needed to be. Now, self-discovery doesn’t have to be boring. It can be fun.

The first fun thing I did was taking all the personality quizzes I could get my hands on. Even if these quizzes are not backed by the epitome of science, it could be a useful step to think about the answers to the questions while observing your thoughts.

You could learn something from the results. You can take note of what’s accurate and what’s not. What you like about it and what you didn’t. These are clues to who are you are even if it is at a tiny level. If you know who you are, you are closer to finding out where you want to be.

Some quizzes I would recommend taking would be:

• The Myer’s Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)— Love it or hate it, you have to admit the memes are superior and it is fun to take. Personally, I am a INTJ-A. Love Who is my personal favorite YouTube guru in the area.
• The Love Language Test — This personality quiz is to see how you prefer to receive and show your love. I believe my love language is Quality Time.
• Career Quizzes — To be honest, you could take these career quizzes, but I prefer looking at a list of all the possible careers. Look at the list and cross out everything you definitely would never do and ask yourself why. After a while, you might see that the careers left are in a single sector. Perhaps your sectors are scattered, but the careers have a common thread.

Please note that none of these external links are sponsored. These are links I personally decided to share on my own. We are not affiliated in any way whatsoever.

Aside from quizzes, I would recommend self-discovery prompts through personalized ones made from ChatGPT or ready-made ones.

Step # 3 — Try Things Out!

Just like I tried a day of being a pediatric healthcare physician because I thought I would love it, try out your interest as well.

My motto is as follows:

You can always quit!

You aren’t locked into every single decision. You don’t have to hold onto everything with your molar teeth. You can try things out. You can dabble in a little of this and shimmy in a little bit of that. Life isn’t as static as people act like it is.

A note here, a HUGE NOTE, is to try out your interest without disrupting your secure flow of life. Try out your interests at a bite-size level first.

Instead of throwing things to the wind and going off to be a professional cheese taster in Europe, go to a cheese tasting event.

Instead of throwing away your nine-to-five to start your journey of becoming a horse instructor at a stable near a school, maybe you should try out classes there regularly. You might like the horses, but you may end up like me, and not like the kids.

Through this, you will learn more about what you like and what you don’t. Like for the example of the cheese guy. He goes to the cheese event and realizes he likes the people who make the cheese more than the ones that eat it. Through trying it out, he decides to hang around cheese makers during the process to see if that’s what he likes. He might not like that either, but he is much closer than he was when he started off.

Try out your potential passions. Remember, you can always quit!

The Final Step #4 — Start Living Your Life!

Finding out who you are and what you want to do is a journey — a life long one at that. Following these steps will bring you closer to living authentically. Yes, you could change your mind a million times, but each time you become closer and closer to where you are supposed to be.

Within my own journey, I jumped into a business major before dropping out. I started writing successful fiction novels under a pen name before I quit because it wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to do. I took my own advice and tried things until I reached where I am today.

I write here on this platform and thoroughly enjoy it. I decided I wanted to become a computer engineer and possibly go into robotics. I am in school to accomplish this as we speak. I still want to get married, but a kid or two is pushing it.

I have a couple ideas here and there, but it could all change even though I am pretty settled with my path right now. That idea of change doesn’t freak me out. When you go through this process, if you choose to, it won’t freak you out either. It makes life spicy and exciting to see where you might end up.

It doesn’t make a good movie if the plot is predictable, so let’s live a good life!

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