General Advice for Figuring Out Life

So my friend was telling me about problems at work, and I did my best to resist giving advice and instead focus on mirroring, understanding, rephrasing in terms of feelings/needs, etc.

… But he was sort of soliciting advice and clearly motivated, and I didn’t want him to focus on incomplete advice, so I bit. I ended up sharing advice that roughly described my journey the last few years that I think applies to pretty much all circumstances (including work), though with a lot less bumbling around. This is a slightly cleaned up version of that advice.

I think there’s generally 2 main avenues for ongoing effort — inner and outer (a la AQAL). Outer would be like “what do I do?” (e.g. quit my job), inner would be like “how do I feel?” (e.g. at peace, conflicted, misunderstood, angry, etc). The 2 are in a circular relationship (e.g. communicating with a manager might help ease feelings of betrayal might help you quit and feel good about it).

All of this is predicated on having a good working sense of what you want, need, value in life, AKA the big questions. You could categorize connecting with enduring values as inner work, but I think it’s a big enough bucket to break out.

So 3 buckets of work — values, inner and outer.

In my experience, the inner work and the underlying values work receive a lot less attention, for a lot of reasons. Thus, I think for most people, 90%+ of the most important work just requires some space for yourself and a pen/paper, maybe plus some supportive ears and hearts.

To use an engineering metaphor, I think doing the inner work first is analogous to doing a thorough design review before implementing vs YOLOing into development, where YOLOing refers to trying to forge forward without having a sense of what forward is. In the long run, thoughtful design builds a solid foundation that typically saves time and effort.

Edit: If inertia (to stay put) is a strong force in your life, which is the case for many people, then you may not have tried that many things, and thus may not have much data to work with. In which case, first (make the space to) do things. Anything. Spending time thinking will mostly exacerbate the inertia to stay put.

Values

Here’s what you’re going for: a sense of what a “good” life for you is, and what the most important components of that are — partner, character, happiness, meaning/purpose, family, friends, status, impact, money, etc.

If you haven’t spent concentrated effort on this before, I recommend taking the longest vacation you possibly can, go to somewhere that helps you be thoughtful/reflective, and draft something out. I also recommend writing because it usually forces you to clarify your thoughts.

From doing this, you might find that your model of those things and how you relate/prioritize them is fairly low fidelity. This might be a great lesson in humility, and lead you to prioritize finding out.

I think the field of positive psychology is a great resource for this work. PERMA is the best known, I like Harvard’s flourishing framework best; ultimately they all say similar things, I’d say if you found one you resonated with that’d be plenty, they’re just helpful frameworks to structure your thinking on your values (more here).

From there (or potentially even before/without), I think a useful exercise is “what’s the minimum set of… things, physical or otherwise that you think you would need to live a good life”.

Ultimately, if you came out of this with even fuzzy, rough ideas written down, that would be great and very helpful for orienting your life. And hopefully as you accumulate life experience, you’ll be able to revise, refine, or even totally reevaluate these over the course of your life.

Once you’re armed with a working idea of what’s important, then you’re ready to tackle the other stuff.

Inner

Here, you’re primarily trying to improve your subjective experience (how you feel about your life and moments in it).

This is primarily accomplished through reframes, often referred to as insights. Basically it’s realizing “actually this ‘important’ thing isn’t important”, and/or vice versa.

Some examples:

• Reframing annoying management of office politics as important efforts to help teammates through their unique challenges and goals in life.
• Reframing problems with your partner as useful opportunities to improve your communication skills
• Reframing missing a train as an opportunity to [meet some other need — eat, relax, read, catch up with a friend, etc.]
• Reframing all problems as opportunities to learn/grow, and to practice treating life as play

Basically, emotional judo.

In practice, understanding your internal state (sensations, perceptions, feelings, needs) is often a prerequisite to insight. You have to know where you’re at to improve it (e.g. “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”). And confidence that you can monitor and affect your interior state hugely benefits your sense of security.

This is the realm of stuff like therapy, Gendlin focusing, meditation, journaling, NVC (learning how to talk about it), potentially psychedelics, etc. I’m still very much in the learning phases of these things. But I do know that this work also pays huge dividends in your relationships with other people, among lots of other stuff (e.g. “New Work Needs Inner Work”)

Feb 2023 edit: cultivating self acceptance and self esteem and self love *chef’s kiss*. IFS, shadow work, Authentic Relating, among other modalities, have been incredibly helpful for me

Outer

Finally, the section we’ve all been waiting for. What do you actually do?

Say you’re thinking of quitting your job — what are all the feelings that come up when you imagine it? Maybe you actually look at your priorities and say “actually financial security is #1 and I need to work around that”, and line up a higher paying job before leaving. Or maybe there’s tons of anxiety around interviewing and you either address that head on or you decide to just negotiate the biggest raise possible in your current role. Or maybe you try and get a new manager/team at the company. Or maybe you stay because your relationships there are too important to you — or maybe you need to have open conversation with the people you care about first to be OK with leaving. Point being, there’s near infinite actions to take, the appropriate ones depend on (accurate judgment of) your values and feelings/needs.

In my experience this is the realm of advice from other people, where the other realms are rarely touched beyond a cursory fashion. I (and others I know) tend to jump into “have you tried X”, “why don’t you do Y”, without even really understanding where you want to go. Having said that, other people’s suggestions are often still useful as inspiration for action and/or (important) validation.

But if you want a guide, I think the book “Designing Your Life” is solid, though it barely covers the foundational values and the inner stuff. I wouldn’t recommend only following the book, but it slots in quite well for outer work.

Maybe you want to try a new thing. Here’s some inspiration for how to get started, but bias towards just doing the thing.

Conclusion

FWIW I think all this stuff is at minimum a multi year journey, probably life long. I’ve been bumbling through this stuff solo for a few years and have only recently been able to even name what’s been going on, much less be “doing it well”. Though recently I’ve found a part of Twitter that seems to be doing all this stuff too!! Hopefully I bumbled so that people I care about can bumble less.

On the other hand, our intuitions can be quite powerful, and following that might take you the right way most of the time anyways, especially if all the inner work sounds too daunting. Though if you’re reading this, intuition probably has reached its limit (or you aren’t connected enough with yourself to fully access your intuition — I know I’m not).

So having said all this, for any major life problem, if you got a first draft of values, did some brainstorming of options with people, got in touch with some feelings, saw a therapist, had some important conversations where you heard and expressed feelings/needs, and made a change or 2, I think you’d be sitting great. Way more than most people already.

And finally, as with anything that we don’t jump out of bed ecstatic to get working on, communities of practice are super useful, for support, accountability, motivation, and more. I’ll plug that in my experience, crewing in the Microsolidarity sense has been super helpful. I’m considering experimenting with being in a ton of crews simultaneously, so if you’re open to giving crewing a shot, please give me a shout, slide into the DMs, whatever (I’m on Twitter now!).