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If You Need to Hear This Today… You are allowed to know something isn’t right before you know what would be better. You can know you don’t want to keep doing your job this way without knowing what career you want instead. You can recognize that something in a relationship needs to change without knowing […]
If You Need to Hear This Today…
You are allowed to know something isn’t right before you know what would be better.
You can know you don’t want to keep doing your job this way without knowing what career you want instead.
You can recognize that something in a relationship needs to change without knowing exactly what that change should look like.
You can even think, “I know this isn’t it,” while having absolutely no idea what it is.
That doesn’t make the information useless.
It makes it incomplete.
And incomplete information is still information.
I think we sometimes make self-awareness unnecessarily terrifying because we assume that the moment we acknowledge how we really feel, we become responsible for immediately doing something about it.
If I admit I hate this job, do I have to quit?
If I acknowledge that I’m unhappy, does that mean my marriage is over?
If I let myself admit I want something different, am I ungrateful for what I have?
If I stop convincing myself that everything is fine, am I going to have to blow everything up?
That last question came up in a recent conversation with my friend Kate DeBont, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Because I think there are a lot of people walking around with a quiet “not this” somewhere inside them.
And maybe you don’t need to turn it into a decision yet.
Maybe you can start by listening.
What do you do when something in your life doesn’t feel right, but you don’t know what you want instead? Learn why “not this” is still useful information—and why awareness doesn’t require immediate action.
When Self-Awareness Starts to Feel Like a Threat
We talk a lot about self-awareness as though more awareness is automatically freeing.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it’s deeply inconvenient.
Because once you notice something, you can’t entirely un-notice it.
And if you’ve learned to associate awareness with action, it can feel safer not to look too closely.
You keep pushing through the job.
You dismiss the irritation.
You tell yourself the relationship is fine.
You explain away the exhaustion.
You remind yourself of all the reasons you should be happy.
Because somewhere underneath all of that may be a fear that sounds like:
If I tell myself the truth, I’m going to have to change my life.
But awareness and action are not the same thing.
There is space between:
“This doesn’t feel right.”
and
“Here is exactly what I’m going to do about it.”
That space matters.
In my work as a therapist and speaker, I spend a lot of time talking about the space between what we feel and what we do. Feelings can give us information without automatically becoming instructions.
Anger can tell me a boundary may have been crossed without telling me to send the email I’m currently composing in all caps.
Anxiety can alert me to uncertainty without proving that something terrible is about to happen.
Disappointment can show me that something mattered without meaning I made the wrong choice.
And that quiet feeling of “this isn’t it” may be worth listening to without requiring you to hand in your resignation by Friday.
Your emotions can be information without becoming orders.
“Not This” Is Still Information
There’s a moment in my conversation with Kate where we talk about knowing what you don’t want.
And I think we often expect that information to do more work than it actually can.
Knowing what you don’t want does not inherently provide its opposite.
If I tell you I don’t want chocolate ice cream, you still don’t know whether I want strawberry, vanilla, mint chocolate chip, or whether I’ve decided I’d rather have French fries.
You eliminated one option.
That matters.
But it didn’t magically reveal the answer.
Life can work that way too.
Not this job.
Okay.
That doesn’t mean you know your dream career.
Not this dynamic.
Okay.
That doesn’t mean you know exactly what the relationship needs.
Not this pace.
Okay.
That doesn’t mean you’ve figured out how to rearrange a life containing children, bills, deadlines, aging parents, responsibilities, and a dishwasher that apparently needs to be emptied every single day for the rest of time.
Sometimes we learn what we want by gathering enough information about what fits and what doesn’t.
Not this.
A little more of that.
Definitely not that.
Oh. That felt good.
I miss this.
I keep coming alive over here.
I keep shrinking over there.
We collect clues.
And eventually, those clues can start pointing somewhere.
What If You Know Something Needs to Change—but You Can’t Change It Yet?
This is where I think conversations about “following your truth” can become far too tidy.
Real life has logistics.
You may know a job is draining you and still need the health insurance.
You may recognize that a relationship needs attention while also knowing you aren’t ready to decide what that means.
You may want to change careers while supporting a family.
You may know exactly what you want and simply not have the money, time, childcare, capacity, support, or opportunity to do it yet.
That doesn’t mean you aren’t listening to yourself.
In Kate’s story, there were years when she knew corporate work wasn’t ultimately what she wanted and continued doing it because there was another equally important truth: she needed stability and needed to care for her children.
Two things can be true.
This isn’t where I want to stay.
And:
This is what I need right now.
We don’t have to make one truth disappear in order for the other one to matter.
This is something I care deeply about when I speak with organizations about burnout, communication, boundaries, and emotional wellbeing. I’m not particularly interested in handing someone a beautiful idea that collapses the minute it comes into contact with their actual life.
A useful insight has to survive reality.
And the reality is that sometimes recognizing something needs to change happens long before you have the ability—or readiness—to change it.
Not Being Ready Doesn’t Mean You Have to Pretend
There’s another trap here that I think is easy to fall into.
If I can’t change it, maybe I should stop feeling this way.
If I’m staying, maybe I should convince myself I like it.
If I chose this, maybe I’m not allowed to be disappointed by parts of it.
If other people would be grateful to have what I have, maybe I should stop wanting more.
But not being ready to change something doesn’t require you to pretend that it feels right.
That distinction feels enormously important to me.
Because pretending costs something.
It asks you to keep arguing with your own experience.
Instead, maybe you can say:
This is where I am right now.
There are reasons I am here.
Some of those reasons matter deeply to me.
And there are also things about this that are not working for me anymore.
That isn’t failure.
That’s clarity.
And clarity gives us somewhere to begin.
Your Feelings Can Be a GPS, Not a Verdict
During my conversation with Kate, we talked about what happens when you repeatedly find yourself in environments where something just doesn’t sit right.
If your primary goal is fitting in, you may interpret that discomfort as evidence:
Maybe I’m bad at this.
Maybe I’m difficult.
Maybe everyone else understands something I don’t.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me.
But if the goal shifts from fitting in to understanding yourself, the exact same feeling can become information.
Instead of a verdict, it becomes a kind of GPS.
Not necessarily:
TURN LEFT IMMEDIATELY.
Sometimes more like:
Recalculating…
Which, frankly, feels much closer to how most meaningful life changes actually happen.
You notice.
You learn.
You try something.
You discover that isn’t quite it either.
Recalculating.
You learn something else.
Eventually, you begin inching toward a direction that feels more like you.
That’s part of what I love about speaking on emotional wellbeing and self-trust: often the shift isn’t about teaching people some completely new thing. It’s helping them recognize the information they’ve already been receiving and relate to it differently.
The Things That Didn’t Fit Weren’t Necessarily Wasted Time
This may be one of my favorite parts of Kate’s story.
Her current work wasn’t born from one glorious moment where the clouds parted, a beam of light appeared, and she suddenly understood her purpose.
She had jobs she didn’t like.
She tried coaching models that didn’t feel right.
She struggled with the idea of charging individuals enormous amounts of money for coaching.
She went back into corporate environments.
She discovered things about how she works well—and things about how she absolutely does not.
And eventually those experiences began connecting.
Kate realized she wanted to support people, but she didn’t want the individual who was already struggling to be the person paying thousands of dollars for that support. Her experience inside workplaces also showed her how valuable it could be for employees to have access to a real person outside HR, management, or their personal life who could simply listen and help them make sense of what they were carrying.
Suddenly, some of the experiences that looked like detours became useful data.
That doesn’t mean every difficult experience happens “for a reason.”
I don’t think we need to romanticize pain to learn from it.
But sometimes we can look backward and realize:
Oh. I know something now because I lived through that.
Maybe the things that didn’t fit were still teaching you something about what does.
Sometimes You Need to Take Your Foot Off the Gas
Near the end of our conversation, Kate said something deceptively simple:
Sometimes you just have to take your foot off the gas.
And immediately I thought about what actually happens when you do that.
The car doesn’t stop.
It keeps moving.
Just more slowly.
And if you’re careening down a road you aren’t even sure you want to be on, maybe slowing down is wiser than pressing harder on the accelerator simply because you’re afraid to lose momentum.
I think a lot of us respond to uncertainty by trying harder.
More research.
More planning.
More thinking.
More fixing.
More pressure to FIGURE OUT WHAT I’M DOING WITH MY LIFE IMMEDIATELY, PLEASE AND THANK YOU.
But clarity doesn’t always arrive faster because you chase it harder.
Sometimes you need enough quiet to hear yourself.
Sometimes the next move is not acceleration.
It’s deceleration.
The Heart of This Conversation
You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to begin trusting what you already know.
That’s the heart of it.
Self-trust isn’t always:
“I know exactly what I want and I’m brave enough to go get it.”
Sometimes self-trust sounds much less impressive:
“I know this doesn’t feel right.”
“I don’t know what that means yet.”
“I’m not ready to change it.”
“But I’m going to stop pretending I don’t know.”
That is movement.
Maybe not visible movement.
Maybe nobody else would even recognize it.
But internally, something has shifted.
You’ve stopped requiring yourself to have the entire answer before you’re allowed to acknowledge the first piece of information.
And that can be where change begins.
A Gentle Reflection
If there’s a quiet “not this” somewhere in your life right now, you don’t need to turn it into a plan.
Instead, get curious.
Is it really all of this that doesn’t fit, or one part?
What do you wish there were more of?
What keeps rubbing against something inside you?
What do you miss?
What feels like relief?
What do you keep trying to convince yourself you should enjoy?
You don’t need to answer all of those questions today.
Just notice what comes up.
Because all of it is information.
And perhaps you don’t need to know “then what?” quite yet.
Maybe, for today, you can trust the “not this.”
FAQ
Is it normal to know something is wrong but not know what you want?
Yes. Recognizing what isn’t working and knowing what you want instead are two different pieces of information. You can take the first seriously without having the second figured out.
Does self-awareness mean I have to make a change?
No. Awareness gives you information; it doesn’t create an obligation to act immediately. Your finances, relationships, family, responsibilities, capacity, and readiness are part of the decision too.
How do I figure out what I want when I feel stuck?
Instead of forcing yourself to identify the perfect answer, start collecting smaller pieces of information. Notice what gives you energy, what drains you, what you miss, what feels relieving, and which parts of your current situation actually do work for you.
What if I know I hate my job but I can’t quit?
You can acknowledge that the job isn’t right for you while also recognizing why staying may currently be necessary. Staying for financial stability or other responsibilities doesn’t require you to convince yourself that you love the situation.
How can I trust myself when I don’t know what comes next?
Self-trust doesn’t require certainty. It can begin with believing your own experience enough to say, “I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m willing to listen to what I’m learning.”
One Last Thing…
If you remember nothing else, remember this:
“Not this” is still information.
You do not need a resignation letter.
You do not need a five-year plan.
You do not need to know whether the answer is this, that, or something you haven’t even imagined yet.
You can notice.
You can listen.
You can take your foot off the gas.
And you can let what you learn become part of the information you carry forward.
Not being ready to change something doesn’t require you to pretend that it feels right. That is where I ultimately landed at the end of my conversation with Kate, and I think it’s the sentence I most want you to carry with you.
If this is a conversation your team, organization, professional association, or conference needs too, this is the heart of much of my work as a speaker: helping people understand what their emotions are communicating so they can respond with greater clarity, communicate more honestly, and make changes that actually fit their lives.
And if you want to hear Kate and me work through all of this—with considerably more swearing, Tinder commentary, and at least one discussion about standing in Tesco holding melons—the full conversation is waiting for you on Don’t Cut Your Own Bangs.
👉 If this episode resonates, share it with a friend who might also need this reminder. And don’t forget to subscribe so new episodes find you—no chasing required.
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DANIELLE IRELAND, LCSW
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