What to Do When You Don't Know What's Next
The outside input that completes the inner work, and how to bring it in.
I write for founders and executives navigating the inner game of scaling.
This issue was inspired by my recent conversation with Carolyn Moore, executive coach, founder of Wildlight in Portland, and former enterprise sales leader. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, it’s worth your time.
When you don’t know what to build next, what is the first move you make?
If your honest answer is “sit with it longer,” there is a second move that can also give you more perspective.
The Belief Worth Challenging
When a high achiever hits an inflection point, they reach for the right tools. The retreat clears the head. The coach helps you ask better questions of yourself. The journaling slows the spiral so you can hear what is underneath. Each of these has a real job, and you should do all of them.
The belief sitting underneath the inner-work-only approach is that the answer will eventually surface if you sit with the question long enough. Sometimes it does. and sometimes it doesn’t, because the data you need isn’t all inside you to begin with.
What the best inner work does is push you toward one more input that most people forget to bring in. That input is held by the people who have been watching you operate for years.
The next chapter you are trying to figure out is almost always already visible to them. They know which kinds of problems light you up and which kinds drain you. They have a working picture of you that is hard to see from the inside, because you are inside it.
Carolyn Moore figured this out by accident, in the early months of the pandemic, in a 900-square-foot apartment in New York. What she did next is something a lot of high achievers skip.
What It Actually Looks Like
There is one thing Carolyn’s network has done at every inflection point of her career. It has opened the door to her next one.
“Every single one of my jobs has been through someone in my community or someone in my network. I have never landed a job with a cold application.”
Four roles in four years before Yelp, all through people she knew. Six years at Yelp, the introduction made when her previous company started advertising there. Post-sales leadership at ClassPass. Then back into the network for what came next. For two decades, the network had reliably supplied her with work.
Then in early 2020 was her last day at ClassPass. Three weeks later the world closed. She was in a her apartment in New York with a four-month-old, a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a husband working full days from the master bedroom. The kids’ daycare shut, everyone got COVID, and there was no next role to find. Just a different question.
She and her husband decided to move to Portland. The pace slowed, and for the first time in years she had time to think about what she actually wanted to build.
She hired a business coach to help her think through what she was good at. But before any of that, in the quiet stretch of stay-at-home parenting with no one to really talk to, she did something different. She turned to the same network that had opened the door to every job in her career, and she asked it for something else.
She sent out a survey to about a hundred people. The questions she asked are the ones most of us would never think to put to the people around us.
“What do you see me being good at? You’ve known me for years. What is that thing that you see? What do you come to me for? When do you see me at my happiest?”
The responses came back. Her own word for what she found was “reaffirming.” The pattern was familiar: the version of her the people around her had been watching for years, laid out where she could finally see it.
“Getting answers by remembering who I was, tapping into the people who know me best, rather than scrolling and trying to get answers.”
Wildlight, the coaching practice she runs now, came directly out of that data. The first version was a six-week pilot with seven women in 2021. Her first full paying client came in January 2022. By 2024 she was running six group coaching cohorts and a steady one-on-one practice, and she calls 2024 her best year in business.
She recognized what was already there. The data was in the room, and the network had been carrying it the whole time. She just used it for something the network is rarely asked to do.
If this resonates, forward it to a founder or executive who is between chapters and trying to think their way to the next one.
From the Coaching Room
I worked with a client who was considering a career change after ten years in her existing field. One of the exercises we did together was around core values. Once she was clear on hers, she had what she needed to decide. She left the career she had spent a decade building and moved into a new field that was more aligned with what she was looking for.
The values work was the inner half of what made the move possible. It surfaced clarity from inside that she could act on. The same kind of clarity, from the opposite direction, is what Carolyn’s survey of a hundred people gave her. One started from the inside, the other from the outside.
I have seen both unlock decisions clients had been carrying for years, and I have rarely seen one do it alone.
The clarity you are looking for is rarely all on one side of the line, it’s worth it to explore it from many different perspectives.
What the Research Actually Shows
The picture of you at your best is built from both sides.
In 2005, a group of organizational psychologists at the University of Michigan published the foundational framework that has come to be known as the Reflected Best Self.
The premise, published in Academy of Management Review, is the academic articulation of what Carolyn did intuitively. Ask around twenty people in your life for two or three concrete stories about a time they saw you at your best, then read across the stories for the pattern.
The framework treats the picture of who you are at your best as something built from two sources at once: what you can see through your own reflection, and what the people around you have observed. Both matter. The framework’s specific contribution is showing that the second source, the one most high achievers under-use, often surfaces strengths and patterns that introspection alone tends to miss. Two decades later the exercise is used at Michigan Ross, Wharton, and a long list of executive education programs.¹
People will tell you, but only if you ask.
In 2022, Nicole Abi-Esber and her colleagues at Harvard Business School and Berkeley Haas published five experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology testing how willing people actually are to give honest, useful feedback.
Across 1,984 participants, the pattern was consistent: we dramatically underestimate how much the people around us would tell us, if we asked. In one of their field studies, fewer than three percent of participants told a stranger that she had food or lipstick on her face, even though almost everyone said they would have wanted to be told themselves.²
The implication for someone in transition is direct. The reason you have not heard what other people see in you is not because they do not see it; it is because they assume you do not want it volunteered. When you ask, they tell you.
How to Use the Network You Already Have
If the inward work is the first input, the outside input is the one that completes it. Here is what gathering it looks like in practice.
Use the network you already have. Don’t build a new one.
The temptation when you start asking the question is to want fresh data: new mentors, a new circle, a new advisor. The data you actually need is in the network that already exists: former colleagues, former direct reports, board members, peers from earlier roles, friends who have known you across multiple chapters. They have been watching, and the breadth across roles is what surfaces the signal. A small pool gives you affirmation; a wide pool gives you a pattern.
Ask what they see, not what they think you should do.
The instinct is to crowdsource the answer, but “what do you think I should do next” is the wrong question. It puts your network in a job they cannot do, and you will spend the next month sorting through advice you cannot use. The questions that work are the ones Carolyn asked: “what do you see me being good at” and “when have you seen me at my best.” These ask for observation, which the people around you can actually supply.
Read for what gets repeated.
Look for the response that shows up across three people from different parts of your life who would not naturally compare notes. That repetition is the data, and it is rarely the most flattering thing said about you. It is almost always the part of yourself you have stopped noticing because it has been so consistent for so long that it stopped registering as a strength. The thing you do without thinking is often the thing other people came to you for.
Treat what comes back as reaffirmation, not discovery.
The framing matters. If you read the responses looking for something surprising, you will overweight the unfamiliar and miss the signal. If you read them as reaffirmation, you will recognize what is already there and let it give you permission to act on it. Carolyn’s word was “reaffirming.” That is the posture. The data is not asking you to invent from scratch. It is asking you to start from what is already there.
The Bigger Picture
At an inflection point, a lot of high achievers default to one of two responses. They lean further into the inner work alone, waiting for the next chapter to surface from inside; or they accelerate, taking the next role or the next round before the answer has had time to arrive. Both moves keep the inquiry locked inside the same head that got stuck.
Carolyn’s move was different. She used the same network that had helped to open the door to every job in her career, and she asked it for self-knowledge instead of openings. The data came back, and she used it to build.
“Now that I look back, nothing is random. Everything is actually meant to be the way that it played out.”
That sentence is only available on the other side of asking. The looking-back coherence she described is not magic; it is what you see when you pair your own reflection with the input from people who have a working picture of you.
You don’t have to invent your next chapter. You have to recognize it. Some of the data you need is in the people who already know you. The work is to ask for it.
P.S. What is the one thing the people who know you well consistently come to you for, that you have stopped noticing about yourself? I read every response.
About the author
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page.
If you want to go deeper, check out the references used in our research:
¹ Roberts, L. M., Dutton, J. E., Spreitzer, G. M., Heaphy, E. D., & Quinn, R. E. (2005). Composing the reflected best-self portrait: Building pathways for becoming extraordinary in work organizations. Academy of Management Review, 30(4), 712–736. The foundational framework for the Reflected Best Self exercise, which combines an individual’s introspective work with stories from people who have observed them at their best.
² Abi-Esber, N., Abel, J. M., Schroeder, J., & Gino, F. (2022). “Just letting you know …” Underestimating others’ desire for constructive feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(6), 1362–1385. Across five experiments with 1,984 participants, people systematically underestimated how much others wanted to receive constructive feedback, leading them to volunteer it less often than warranted.
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