‘Wayfinding’ – 4 Guiding Principles For Creating A Clear Direction In Life
“People don’t realize that the future is just now, but later.” – Russel Brand
After publishing a previous article on the importance of personal foresight, I got myself into a bit of hot water. A few people got back to me saying they were experiencing way too much short-term uncertainty to come up with anything resembling a long-term vision.
In some respects, that’s fair enough. This type of visioning is challenging even at the best of times. Besides, COVID-19 didn’t just throw a spanner in the works, for most of us it chucked in the whole damn tool rack. Yet, the reason why so many people struggle to think about the long-term isn’t COVID-related. It's that they often simply misunderstand what a vision is supposed to look like.
Visioning doesn’t involve picking the precise destination of where you want to end up in ten years' time – for example, listing how many properties you’ll own or how many certificates will be hanging on your wall. But it does involve choosing a clear direction of where you’re heading and who you want to become along the way.
Too many people think in absolutes. They assume there’s only one possible happy future out there for them. It then becomes their lifelong mission to figure out what that one possible happy future looks like and then to make it happen. But once you accept there are in fact many happy futures possible – each quite distinct but equally fulfilling – then creating a vision becomes much more fun and liberating.
In one of these universes, you might be working as a location-independent freelancer and living in a lovely house on the coast. In another, you’re a hotshot executive with an excellent work/life balance and a cosy terraced home that you’ve nearly paid off. And maybe in yet another universe, you’re a respected maths teacher living as part of a throuple in a conscious community in Glastonbury. Three different universes – all perhaps equally satisfying depending on your values.
Visioning then becomes the art of figuring out what your definition is of a ‘rich and meaningful' life. In this article, I’ll use the term ‘wayfinding’ – the ancient Polynesian technique of navigating the seas – to highlight four areas you need to get clear on when coming up with that definition.
Applying this kind of ‘multiverse’ thinking to your future, you start to appreciate there’s isn’t one ‘right answer’ when it comes to planning the future allows you to tread through life a little more nimbly. Decisions suddenly become less binary – good/bad – because you know there are many possible lives out there for you – all different but rich and meaningful in their own way.
Life lessons from Moana
If you haven’t seen the 2016 Disney movie Moana, you’ve probably been living under the same rock as me. It tells the story of a little Samoan girl who steals a canoe and – against the orders of her village elders – ventures beyond the safety of the reef to stop an environmental catastrophe from happening.
The story depicts the colonisation of the central and eastern Pacific islands – still considered one of the greatest human endeavours ever. To appreciate how significant an adventure that was, just picture the hundreds of tiny little dots of land spread across thousands of miles in the largest ocean on the planet. Now imagine nearly every single one of them getting settled in just over a hundred years.
While we don’t know the reason for this sudden migration, we do have a good idea as to why it happened so quickly. Turns out that Polynesians were absolute masters in the (nearly) lost art of:
“Wayfinding – the skill of figuring out where you’re going without knowing how to get there, and without the help of modern navigation.”
To explore the world around them, Polynesians made use of their intimate knowledge of canoe building, ocean currents, bird migration, seasonal winds and celestial bodies. These were all passed on from generation to generation through songs and stories.
When it comes to navigating the wild currents of our own personal lives, Moana offers a powerful metaphor.
Vision: the bottleneck of talent
Even long before COVID happened, many of us were going through life without much direction.
Some took pride in being the type of person who ‘goes with the flow’. And to be fair, being agreeable and light-footed can be a great approach to life. But the flip side is that if you don't make conscious decisions about your future, you’re merely delegating them to someone else.
Going with the flow can therefore quickly become an excuse for seeking out a hedonistic life on auto-pilot. All it then takes is a rip current in the form of a break-up, COVID-19, a terrible employer – and that little floaty you were happily bobbing along on top of is suddenly lost at sea. And just like Heihei, the dumb chicken in Moana, you’ve become a hapless accessory in someone else’s heroic journey.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are many capable and motivated people who suddenly discover that all their forward planning hasn’t exactly led to a rich and meaningful life either. Sure, they set career goals and got ahead thanks to their grit and a powerful desire to become someone. And then one day, they look in the mirror not quite remembering what it was all for, or worse, not liking who they’ve become.
The issue here wasn’t a lack of planning but a lack of vision – not understanding what a ‘rich and meaningful’ life should look like.
As author James Clear says: “Vision is the bottleneck of talent. Most talent is wasted because people don’t clearly know what they want. It’s not a lack of effort, but a lack of direction.”
By applying the four principles I’ll set out below, you’ll build a great compass to help you stay on course even if the destination itself hasn’t revealed itself yet.
Finding direction in life
In my previous article, I offered a number of practical tips on how to visualise your future self. But how does one plan ahead when life has a tendency to throw several curve balls at once?
Let’s say that on average your future is determined by 50 per cent planning, 25 per cent serendipity and 25 per cent bad luck. Wayfinding allows you to prepare for the shitty disappointments, as well as the equally inevitable good fortune life will bestow upon you along the way.
There are four wayfinding principles that guide you towards a rich and meaningful future. Getting clear on each of those principles will help you paint a decent picture of the direction you want to be heading towards but without the pressure of needing the full detail.
These four principles include your logos, core values, past self, and future identity. Together, they provide a set of personal guidelines you can refer to at any time to check whether you’re on track.
#1: Logos
Logos means reason in Greek, but I’m using it in a slightly different context – that of logotherapy. First coined by neurologist and existential psychologist Victor Frankl, logotherapy states that:
“The primary motivation behind every person’s actions is to find purpose and meaning in life.”
According to Frankl, there are three ways to uncover purpose and meaning:
· Through work and deeds
· Through experiences and encounters
· Through the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering
As a holocaust survivor, Frankl had first-hand experience with the latter. He said it was his drive to publish an unfinished manuscript (which later became the classic Man’s Search For Meaning), that allowed him to survive the concentration camps.
Frankl believed there’s an important distinction between purpose and meaning.
Purpose refers to what you do in life and who you do it for. Meaning relates to why you do it.
Let’s say you work as a barista and you love your job. You enjoy it because serving yummy mummies with third-wave coffee (what & who – purpose) allows you to promote high-quality and ecological artisanal products (meaning). Or, doing the weekly shopping for your elderly neighbour (how & who) gives you a break from playing The Sims all day – helping someone out in real life instead (why – meaning).
Frankl discovered that people often become psychologically damaged whenever their search for meaning becomes blocked. That’s why a lot of my work as a life coach focuses on helping people redirect their actions towards what feels meaningful to them, and away from meaningless activities.
But here lies a problem: how to distinguish between what carries meaning and purpose, and what doesn’t?
First of all, when I speak about meaning and purpose, I’m not talking about finding out the Supremely Divine reason you were put on this Earth. That’s a pretty narcissistic concept anyway, and it puts a lot of pressure on you to find out what it is.
Instead, let’s assume that you’re just a tiny slice of consciousness that accidentally got caught in a human body while your biological parents were scrambling their DNA together after a few too many Margaritas. As a result, there’s really no innate reason for why you're here. Neither is there one for any of us.
The existential question we all have to ask ourselves isn't ‘why am I here?’. The question should be: “Now that I’m here, what can do with my time that’s important?”
Taking out the supernatural makes the idea of finding meaning both practical and immediate. Some find meaning in saving lives as a fireman. Others find it in keeping the fire station as clean as possible. But for an activity to feel meaningful, it needs to satisfy what Luis A Marrero describes as five fundamental human strivings:
Love: Being surrounded by people who genuinely care for and respect one another, as well as the environment.
Peace and peace of mind: Feeling safe, protected, and at ease. Others having your back.
Happiness: Being mindful of — and grateful for — the good in your life. You’re content.
Engagement: Doing interesting things with stimulating people in exciting places.
Prosperity: Feeling that life is worth living. You’re growing intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, financially, and experientially.
Creating experiences that improve those opportunities for love, peace of mind, gratitude, engagement with others, and prosperity, will help you live a more meaningful life. Anything else won’t.
That is why understanding your logos is the first and most important pillar when it comes to figuring out your direction in life.
#2: Personal values
Us coaches love helping people uncover their values. It’s fun work, and it provides clients with immediate feedback on what’s important to them. That makes it the second guiding principle for wayfinding your future.
“Your personal values are the fundamental beliefs you have about yourself and about how the world around you should function.”
You may be conscious of them or not, but they’re the rules that guide all your decisions. They represent everything you stand for and anything you won’t put up with.
Whenever I put people on the spot, they’ll tell me their values are something like ‘honesty’, ‘integrity’, ‘love’, or ‘justice’. It's an answer that always makes me yarn a little, so I'll often push them to dig a little deeper. And lo and behold, most of the time they don’t even make the final list. That’s because they’re virtues that, unlike values, relate to cultural norms rather than individual ones.
“Personal freedom starts when you start living life according to your personal values, not those forced upon you by your family, peers or your community.”
Becoming familiar with your core values is pretty straightforward. Find yourself a list with the most common ones and pick out those that speak to you deeply. The real interesting work is in defining what each of those values means to you, and how you live by them daily.
For example, the value of ‘freedom’ to me might be roaming around butt naked in a pink feather boa in the Burning Man desert. For you, it could mean owning a beautiful mansion as an expression of your financial autonomy and love for design. Likewise, ‘love’ for me might mean a spiritual, emotional and sensual desire to connect with people, while for you it might involve helping out your local Church group with the Christmas raffle.
Aside from the fact that I’ll be having a lot more fun than you (fun being another one of my values), my interpretation of freedom and love is no better or worse than yours. Indeed, there’s no hierarchy when it comes to values. And yet because they’re so vital to our identity, we’ll often fight tooth and nail for them.
Having well-defined personal values will guard you against making choices that work against who you are. It also allows you to test your decision against whether you’ve made it based on the values of those around you (parents, peers, society), or your own.
#3: Past self
Although slightly counterintuitive, a good technique to decide what you want for your future is to keep an eye on any past experiences that felt really significant. Indeed, developing your hindsight skills is a great way to improve self-awareness.
When it comes to enhancing those skills, Abraham Maslow – best known as the author of the hierarchy of needs – recommended listing peak experiences. Rather poetically, he described them as:
“The rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.”
For some, they involve the birth of a child or falling in love for the first time. Others prefer memories of tripping on mushrooms in Goa or jumping out of an aeroplane.
Whenever I work with a new client, one of the first questions I ask is what their favourite memory is. Everyone grumbles because nobody’s ever asked them that question before. But getting clear on what makes certain experiences so delightful can be extremely helpful.
Come up with your top ten of peak experiences by imagining that you’re having a near-death experience and life flashing before your eyes. This exercise is known as a life review. Make a list by recalling at least one top memory for each year you’ve lived from the age of six. If you have diaries or photo albums, you can browse through them.
Alongside all the positive, also do a mental review of your fundamental fears, displeasures and anxieties. This will be uncomfortable, but reflecting on your failures and learning to accept them is the only way to move forward.
As the third wayfinding pillar, a life review will help you create a better understanding of your current and future self. You’ll start to appreciate how far you've already come while uncovering valuable clues about where to go next.
#4: Future identity and personality
Most people don’t know the difference between identity and personality.
Identity is something you create yourself based on your logos, your values and your past experiences. Your personality is how you then choose to express that identity. In other words, your identity relates to who you are, while personality reflects how you behave. Neither are fixed.
Organisational psychologist Dr Benjamin Hardy believes people get too attached to their personality.
“Identity drives behaviours which, over time, become personality. Your personality — the sum of your consistent attitudes and behaviours — is merely a by-product of identity.” - Dr Benjamin Hardy
The implication is that by changing how you act, you also change your personality. In psychology, this is known as self-signalling.
Let’s say you rarely wake up before 10am and therefore your belief is that you’re not a morning person. If you start consistently waking up at 6am for two weeks straight, your actions will no longer suit the belief that you’re not a morning person. Your conscious mind notices the discrepancy, and over time you’ll stop referring to yourself as a late-sleeper. By altering your behaviour, you’ve effectively changed your personality.
Unfortunately, we’re biased to think that who we are today is exactly who we’ll always be.
That’s bizarre because you can ask anyone if the person they are today is the same person they were ten years ago, and they’ll resolutely say no. Those who do answer with a yes are either lying or haven't done enough to mature.
In my previous article about the future self, I referred to Harvard psychologist, Dr Daniel Gilbert, who calls this discrepancy the ‘end of history illusion’.
This illusion can cause us a lot of problems because by believing that we’re already the finished product today, we give up on our potential to change.
So, the fourth and final wayfinding principle involves accepting that who you are today is not yet the real version of you. By letting go of the notion that your personality is fixed, you can start visualising what that ‘finished version’ of you might look like in ten years’ time.
What are the behaviours they would display on a day-to-day basis towards their loved ones, colleagues, and total strangers?
Conclusion
Leading a happy life involves walking a tightrope between planning and letting go. Neither going with the flow too much nor being too relaxed will get you where you want to get to – as long as you can’t define a clear vision of a rich and meaningful future.
To get clear on that definition, use the four wayfinding elements of logos, values, past and future identity. They’ll serve as your compass, helping you understand the person you want to become while allowing you to stay flexible on your destination.
And just like it did with Moana, that compass will guide you back home whenever you’re on the high seas. As it did with me, it might even lead you to set up home on one of those tropical islands too.
