I hear this a lot. From clients, from coaches I supervise, and honestly, from myself at different points over the last twenty years.

It’s a strange place to be. You’ve got clarity on one half of the equation “this isn’t it, whatever “it” currently is” and total fog on the other half. And the fog is the part that keeps people stuck for years, not months. Because the instinct, when you don’t know what you want, is to try to figure out the whole plan before you move. The five-year plan. The perfect next role. The fully-formed business idea.

That instinct is the problem. Here’s what I use instead with clients, and with myself.

Start at the end, not the beginning

Pick a point in the future. Five years out. Twenty, if that feels more honest. There’s no right answer here, it just needs to be far enough away that you’re not constrained by what feels “realistic” from where you’re standing today.

Now picture the morning. Not a vague sense of contentment; actually picture it. What time do you wake up? What’s the first thing you feel? Not “fine,” not “okay”, what does excited feel like on that morning?

Walk through the day. What’s in it that you’re genuinely looking forward to? What does the week look like around that day? And the work-life balance — be specific. How many hours are you working? How many days are actually, fully yours?

Most people skip this step or rush it, because it feels indulgent or unrealistic. It’s neither. It’s data. The specificity is what makes it useful later.

Now walk it backwards

Once you’ve got that picture, work backwards from it.

What was the last milestone before you arrived at that life? What happened right before that? Keep walking backwards, milestone by milestone, until you land back at today.

This is where the exercise earns its keep. You’re not designing a five-year plan from scratch, you’re reverse-engineering a path from a future you can already feel, back to where you’re actually standing. It’s a completely different mental exercise, and it produces a completely different kind of clarity.

The money question

Somewhere in that backward walk, you’ll hit it: the financial risk. Every version of this future involves one, even if it’s small. A reduced income for a period. A leap before the next thing was fully lined up. Walking away from something secure.

Ask yourself what risk you took, in this imagined future, to get to that life. And more importantly, what did you have to make peace with to take it?

This isn’t a hypothetical exercise in optimism. It’s a way of pressure-testing your own relationship with risk before you’re actually standing at the decision point. People who’ve thought this through in advance make better decisions in the moment, because they’re not negotiating with fear for the first time under pressure.

Back to today

Here’s the payoff. Once you’ve walked the path backwards and sat with the risk, you’re not asking “what should I do with my career?” anymore, an impossibly large question. You’re asking “what’s the next milestone?” A much smaller, much more answerable one.

And that milestone breaks down into something you can actually do today.

Eat the elephant bite by bite

This is the part I’d underline twice if I could. Don’t try to decide the whole five-year plan today. You don’t need to. You need the next bite.

Trying to hold the entire journey in your head at once is exhausting, and it’s usually what stalls people completely: the goal feels too big, so nothing happens. Focus on the next thing. Just the next thing.

When you’re unsure — and you will be

There will be moments, even after all this, where the fog rolls back in. That’s not a sign you got it wrong. It’s part of the process, not a failure of it.

That’s the moment to talk to your coach. Not because you need someone to hand you the answer (you won’t get that, and you shouldn’t want it) but because talking it through with someone who isn’t inside your head is often what turns the fog back into a next step.

You don’t need the whole map to start moving. You need the next step, and the willingness to walk backwards from a future you can actually picture.