Maybe it’s Time to Question Your Goals

Everything started to change for me [around feeling lost] when I started my own process of discovering the things that really energized me, and committed fiercely to them. I wasn’t at a sexy meditation retreat, closeted within the borders of a faraway continent. Or ohm-ing in a forest, surrounded by majestic sequoias. No, I was on the floor of a retail store in southern suburbia.

Seriously. My aha moment came while working part time at a Lululemon so I could afford my rent. Trying to make that whole TV thing work and survive as an adult got real very quickly. By this time I had already been rubbing shoulders with my own unfulfillment. TV? No. Retail? Nope. What on earth was I doing? Sadly, my crystal ball was foggy as fuck.

During a professional development workshop hosted one early Sunday morning while the store was still closed, I sat and listened to a wise woman decades my senior talk about the importance of a mission statement to ground us in why we’re here (not what we’re here to do), and I reflected on all the whats that had left me empty up to this point. Surrounded by half-dressed mannequins and stacks of yoga mats, she asked us to recall a time when we felt the most alive, proud, and energized. From there we’d pick a few words from the list of a hundred-plus values on a printout in our hands.

None of my current or recent work—the work I had been devoting all of my energy to—came up.
None.

Instead, I thought back to a time years prior, as a journalism student in college, when I was doing what I loved just because. Assigned to write an article for the student sports site, I remember sitting down with a former volleyball teammate, who had lost her mother to cancer in the middle of our season. That sport, our sport, had also been a big part of their mother-daughter relationship. And it continued to be a major piece after her death, a support system and an outlet for her grief.

The hug she gave me after that piece was published is one I’ll never forget. I can still feel the warmth of that embrace.

The joy from that simple moment showed me the power for good that words can have. The power of telling women’s stories. Writing can connect others to their own story. To their own goodness and possibility. To themselves. (Case in point: You are finding in this very book what you already have inside you.) It lit me up so much, I felt like a walking lamppost. But I wouldn’t commit to these things I knew gave me a spark until later—way later, when I basically had no choice.

It wasn’t until hitting the depths of my lost feelings that I came back to this moment—to the memory of a memory. I didn’t think how much writing and women’s stories had always meant to me until my life was actually breaking down because I hated my job and I didn’t know what was next or what universe I even remotely wanted “next” to be in. When I say I was miserable, I mean I was miserable. I was crying a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I remember sitting in my car parked in front of Office Depot on the phone with my brilliant mother, sobbing so hard I couldn’t talk. Because the little things felt like big things. And I didn’t trust myself to make a change. But after one too many basically hysterical phone calls, dinner dates, and borderline anxiety attacks, I realized that I may not know what the final, final thing would be, but I knew what had once made me happy and creative, and no one could stop me from doing that. I’d always had writing, and I would always have it. But I had to do something about that which lit me up. The thing I did next permanently changed the trajectory of my career and my life. And it was a single choice to follow what brought me energy.

That choice was to sign up for a six-week nonfiction writing class at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto (and to fork over more money than my broke twenty-four-year-old self was comfortable with). I arrived to a room of seven badass journalists, writers, and creators who were way, waaaay more experienced than I was. When I showed up for that first class, I wondered what I was actually doing there because I was not on a par with these women. But I trusted that through writing, I could eventually share messages about the topics that I felt were aligned with my excitement the most: women, leadership, and careers.

Within a matter of a few weeks, one of the women in my class brought me the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s business section. On the page was a full-fold image of two women, Amanda Pouchot and Caroline Ghosn, who had started a company based on the same principles I was writing about in that class. “You should get in touch with these women. It might be a great platform for your writing,” she said.

I did get in touch with them. And what began as a single small choice to follow the things that energized me eventually became an opportunity that would turn out to be the rocket ship of my life so far: Amanda and Caroline, the founders of Levo hired me as one of the first employees of their company, and I went on to travel the world, building out their global off-line communities to help elevate women’s careers (Local Levo!!). I got to meet young professional women on the rooftops of Milan and talk about workplace barriers, I got to host negotiation trainings overlooking the London Eye and hear about their insecurities, and in countless cities in between, I was a part of creating a movement for dreamers. And it humbled me. To my core. I saw intimately the challenges and obstacles and fears that we’re all faced with.

Not only are we not alone, but together, we’re unstoppable.

None of these plans were even remotely a part of my original big picture. I never could have dreamt up that dream with all the time and creativity in the world. But it was one of the best things that ever happened for me, and it was all created by following in one small way what deeply energized me.

If you had asked me to define my reason for being during the moments when I felt the most lost, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. A why, a purpose . . . it all felt too heady. But I could absolutely identify the feeling of a spark. And I do believe we all intimately know what excites us—sometimes you just need someone to come along and ask you the right questions and prompt you to reflect on crucial moments.

We often refuse to go that small because we expect answers to the big stuff—the huge goal, the ultimate destination, the scaled impact. But the only big thing you actually need to know is what gives you the biggest burst of energy.

When I looked back on my life through the lens of what I had been writing about in that class, I realized I had always cared about those things. Like, always always. I took women’s studies classes for fun in college, I performed in The Vagina Monologues onstage, wearing five-inch heels and a full-body spandex and leather jumpsuit because #women, I mentored young girls on their résumés and careers on my own time, and I’d never felt more excited and unstoppable than when I watched a video of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2010 TED Talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.” But for some reason I never took the time to identify that this is what was giving me megawatt energy. Because I was too obsessed with hot-pink-circled goals and my sound-goody achievements.

I had never taken the time to question my goal. I’d never asked myself if the same thing that brought me so much joy for no reason at all—like studying, working with, writing about, and engaging around women’s leadership issues—was the key to finding direction.

And that direction led me here, to a destination that seven years ago, I never would have been able to conceptualize. This life was never an end goal I had in mind, but it’s way (waaaaaay) better than anything I had in my list of plans. If you’d described it to me, I would have told you to try again—so dreamy but so not possible.

Following what energizes you will open up the future path for you too. No matter what hell of lost you feel like you’re swimming through, it’s getting you to here. Our lives are changed with tiny decisions led by what excites us the most. Big changes don’t always come from big steps. Often, they are born from the tiniest one that we choose to make once, and then over and over and over again.

And they all start with This just feels right. That rightness will be summed up in all that you already are, all that you will be, all that you care about, and all that you passionately exist for.
Forget the goal. Follow the energy, follow the excitement, follow the spark. It won’t lead you astray. It can’t. Because it’s you.

This is an excerpt from my book You’re Not Lost. If you’re feeling this, you’ll definitely be feeling my book. Read it for yourself or for someone you love!

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