There are questions we become very good at answering as we move through our careers and lives.
What needs to get done? What does my team need from me? What’s the next priority? What would be the sensible career move? What does my family need? What should I be working towards?
And then there is a much simpler question that many women find surprisingly difficult to answer:
What do I actually want?
Not what would look impressive. Not what you think you should want at this stage of your career. Not what makes sense given everything you’ve already invested in. Not what other people need from you.
What do you want now?
It sounds like such an obvious question. But I’ve worked with women for more than two decades, and I know how easy it is to lose touch with the answer.
We get very good at responding to life
Most of us don’t consciously decide to stop thinking about what we want. It happens gradually.
We build careers. We take opportunities. We form relationships and families. We become responsible for teams, businesses, mortgages, children, ageing parents and all the other things that make up a full adult life. There is always something that requires our attention, and often someone else whose needs feel more immediate than our own.
Women, in particular, can become extraordinarily skilled at noticing what everybody else needs. We anticipate, organise, support, solve and respond. Those capacities can make us wonderful leaders, colleagues, partners, friends and parents.
But they can also mean that our own desires become increasingly difficult to hear.
Before long, life can become a series of responses. We take the next logical career step because it is offered. We stay because leaving would be complicated. We keep working towards goals we set years ago because we haven’t stopped to ask whether they still matter. We make choices based on what is practical, expected or already in motion.
None of this necessarily creates an unhappy life. In fact, that’s part of what makes it so easy to miss.
You can be deeply grateful for the life you have and still wonder whether something wants to change.
The woman who set your goals may not be the woman you are now
One of the things I find fascinating about our relationship with ambition is how rarely we revisit the assumptions underneath it.
We can spend years pursuing a particular version of success without asking whether it still belongs to us.
Perhaps you once wanted the senior role, the bigger team or the impressive title. Perhaps financial security was your overriding priority. Maybe you wanted to build a business, travel constantly, reach a particular level in your profession or prove something to yourself about what you were capable of.
There is nothing wrong with any of those ambitions. But the woman who chose them may have been making those choices ten, fifteen or twenty years ago.
You have lived since then.
You have learned things about yourself. Your values may have shifted. Your relationships have changed. You may have achieved things you once desperately wanted and discovered they feel different from the inside. You may have experienced loss, illness, parenthood, success, disappointment, ageing, burnout or simply the passage of time.
And yet we can continue organising our lives around an old definition of success long after we have outgrown it.
Changing what you want doesn’t make your earlier choices wrong. It means you are paying attention to who you have become.
Gratitude and desire can coexist
I think this is where many women get stuck.
If your life is objectively good, wanting something different can feel ungrateful. You have the job, the family, the home, the opportunities or the security you once hoped for. Perhaps you know other people would be delighted to have what you have.
So when a quiet sense of dissatisfaction appears, you dismiss it.
You tell yourself you should be grateful. And of course gratitude matters. There is enormous value in recognising what is good in our lives rather than constantly chasing the next thing.
But gratitude doesn’t require you to stop wanting.
You can love your career and want it to evolve. You can appreciate the life you’ve built and recognise that parts of it no longer fit. You can be grateful for everything a role has given you and know it is time to leave. You can love the people in your life and still need more space for yourself.
These things are not contradictions. They are part of being a person whose life continues to change.
Sometimes we know what we don’t want first
When I ask women what they want, I don’t always expect an immediate answer.
Sometimes we have been disconnected from that question for so long that asking it creates more anxiety than clarity. We start trying to produce the right answer, which rather defeats the purpose.
If that’s where you are, it can be easier to begin by noticing what you know you no longer want.
Perhaps you don’t want to work at this pace anymore. You don’t want every promotion to mean less of your life belongs to you. You don’t want to spend another five years doing work you’ve already mastered. You don’t want to keep managing people. You don’t want to be constantly available. You don’t want to postpone something important to you until some imaginary future when there will finally be enough time.
Knowing what you no longer want creates space.
And in that space, something else can begin to emerge.
It might not arrive as a five-year plan. It may begin as a preference, a curiosity, a longing or simply a feeling of more of this, less of that. That is still useful information.
Wanting is not the same as having a plan
We are often so quick to turn desire into strategy.
The moment we admit we want something, our practical minds arrive with questions. How would that work? What would it cost? What would I have to give up? Is it realistic? What will other people think? What if I change my mind?
Those questions have their place. Eventually, choices have consequences and plans matter.
But if you ask how too quickly, you can shut down what before you have really heard it.
There is value in allowing yourself to know what you want before deciding what you are going to do about it.
You might realise you want more creative work without immediately resigning from your job. You might want a different pace without knowing yet what that looks like. You might want greater leadership, less leadership, a career change, more meaning, more money, more freedom, more challenge, more rest or simply more room in your life.
You don’t have to turn every desire into an action.
But it is difficult to make intentional choices if you don’t know what you are choosing for.
Create enough space to hear yourself
Clarity rarely arrives when every part of our attention is occupied.
If your days are filled from the moment you wake until you fall into bed, there isn’t much room for the deeper questions. We stay focused on what is urgent because urgency is loud. Desire is often much quieter.
This is why reflection matters.
It might happen through journalling, walking, meditation, time away, conversations with someone you trust or simply creating periods in your life where you are not consuming, producing or responding.
The method matters less than the space.
And I don’t think the goal is to emerge with a perfectly articulated life purpose or a ten-year vision. Sometimes the most valuable insight is much smaller: I miss this. I want more of that. This no longer feels like me. I’m curious about what might happen if I tried something different.
Those are the threads worth following.
What would you choose now?
There are seasons of life when we need to put our heads down and get things done. There are responsibilities we cannot simply wish away, compromises we willingly make for people we love, and realities that shape what is possible.
Living intentionally does not mean pretending those things don’t exist.
It means making sure that somewhere among all those responsibilities, your own voice remains part of the conversation.
So perhaps you don’t need to redesign your life or map out the next decade. Perhaps you simply need to become curious again about the woman you are now, rather than continuing to live according to decisions made by an earlier version of you.
If you weren’t simply continuing the life and career you’ve already built, what would you choose now?
Sit with that question for a while before you rush to answer it. You might be surprised by what comes up.
If this is a question you’re ready to explore more deeply, Life Vision & Purpose is one of the individual Women Rising modules now available through The Career Studio. It creates the space and structure to step back from the day-to-day, reconnect with what matters to you, and think intentionally about the life and career you want to create from here.
Because sometimes the next step isn’t about pushing harder towards the future you once planned.
It’s about making sure it’s still the future you want.