What if you’re not stuck?

You may not need to know what comes next. You may only need to know what to look for.

What If You’re Not Stuck?

A woman said something to me recently that I hear from retired women all the time.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She didn’t want to travel. She didn’t want another job. She wasn’t interested in filling her calendar just for the sake of being busy.

She simply did not know what came next.

And I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Because what if “I don’t know what to do” does not mean there is nothing left for you?

What if it simply means you have not yet told yourself what to look for?

That is a very different problem.

For most of our lives, we knew what mattered because somebody else kept handing us the list. Go to work. Raise the children. Pay the bills. Meet the deadline. Take care of the house. Help everybody else. Be useful. Be responsible.

Then retirement arrives and removes a lot of those instructions.

Suddenly there is all this space.

And instead of feeling free, a lot of women feel lost.We start asking, “What am I supposed to do now?”

That sounds like a reasonable question.

I’m beginning to think it may be the wrong one.

A few weeks ago, I asked the women in my Breakthrough group to try a simple experiment.

Look for red cars.

That was it.

Nobody had to manifest one into the driveway. Nobody needed a candle, a vision board, or a private hotline to the universe.

Just picture a red car for a little while.

Then notice

.

And, of course, the red cars started showing up everywhere. At stoplights. In parking lots. On side streets. Outside stores.The cars had not suddenly appeared.

They had been there all along.

What changed was the instruction.

Look for red cars.

One woman in the group told me something I loved.

She said the experiment showed her that she could influence what her mind noticed.

Exactly.

That is the part I care about.

You can tell yourself what matters to YOU.

And once you do, you begin to notice more of it.

Then I came across another experiment that made the red-car exercise even more interesting.

In what is usually called the door study, a researcher stopped someone on the street and asked for directions. While they were talking, two people carrying a large door walked between them. For only a moment, the person giving directions could not see the researcher.

During that tiny interruption, the researcher was replaced by somebody else.

Different person,different clothes, different appearance and different voice.

The person giving directions did not notice.

Think about that.An entire human being changed right in front of them and they missed it.

Psychologists call that change blindness.

I call it one hell of a reminder that we do not notice nearly as much as we think we do.

Now put those two experiments together.

The red-car experiment says you can tell yourself what to notice.

The door study says you can completely miss something important when you are not looking for it.

And suddenly the question is not just interesting.

It becomes personal.

What might already be happening in your life that you are not noticing?

What if you are not stuck?

What if there are pieces of your next life already showing up, but you have not told yourself they matter yet?

That little flicker of curiosity.

That sudden urge to return to discover what used to matter to you.

The book you keep thinking about.

The thought that maybe you would like your mornings to feel different.

The strange relief you felt when you said no.

The idea that keeps coming back.

The thing you want to try but keep dismissing because it seems silly.

What if those are not random little thoughts?

What if they are clues?

We are very good at looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe.

Tired today? See. I’m getting old.Nobody called?See. Nobody needs me anymore. Nothing planned for Tuesday?See. Retirement is boring.Tried something and it didn’t work? See. Too late.

We can build an entire case against our own lives without realizing we are doing it.

We are excellent lawyers for a case we never agreed to argue, usually while standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s clothes eating cereal out of the box like a raccoon who pays property taxes.

But if your mind can look for proof that life is shrinking, it can also look for something else.

That is the part I want women to understand. You have more influence here than you may think.

You may not know what you want to do with the rest of your life yet.

Fine.

You do not have to know. Start with something easier.

How do you want your life to feel?

That question is much more useful.

Do you want to feel peaceful, interested, creative? Do you want to feel useful without being used?

Do you want to feel free and alive?

Do you want to wake up curious about the day instead of wondering how you are supposed to fill it?

Start there.

Then give yourself an instruction.

Show me where I already feel that.

Show me what makes me feel more alive.

Show me what gives me peace.

Show me what makes me curious.

Show me what feels like mine.

Then notice.

That is it.

You are not asking yourself to solve the rest of your life by Friday.

You are teaching yourself what to look for.

And once you begin noticing what gives you energy, what interests you, what makes you feel more like yourself, you have something you did not have before.

A direction,not a map or a five-year plan.

A direction.

And sometimes that is enough to get a woman who feels like she has been walking through mud to take the next step.

I’ve been doing some of this myself without realizing it.

There is a photograph of me that I look at often.

I love the woman in that picture.

She looks peaceful. Confident. Settled. This women doesn’t stop to ask permission. And yes, I would very much like to look like her. That’s besides the point. I am starting to think the more important thing is how I feel when I look at her.

I feel calmer, happier. Something in me recognizes her.

So every time I look at that photograph, I am telling myself something very simple.

This matters to me! Look for this.

And then I start noticing the moments when I already feel more like her.

When I choose painting over obligation or stop rushing.

When I wake up after six straight hours of sleep and think, well damn, maybe something really is changing.

Those moments matter because I have decided they matter.

And that is what I want for the woman who says, “I don’t know what to do.”

I do not want to hand her another list of things retired women are supposed to do.

That is how we got into this mess.

I want her to understand that she can begin somewhere much more personal.

She can choose how she wants her life to feel.Then she can start looking for the places where that feeling already exists.And from there, she can follow the clues.

Because there may already be a wonderful life on the other side of the door.

Not some fantasy life or somebody else’s retirement.

Yours.

But if you keep asking, “What am I supposed to do?” you may keep getting answers built from the old life.

Try a different question.

How do I want to feel now?

Then tell yourself what to look for.

That is not nothing.

That is power.

You do not need to know exactly where you are going before you begin.

You only need to teach yourself what to notice.

And once you do, you might be surprised by how much of your next life has been standing right in front of you all along.

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If this piece stirred something in you, and you’re tired of trying to figure out this part of life alone, come sit at the table with us.

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You don’t need to have retirement figured out before you join us.

That’s rather the point.

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