We Call It Feeling Lost. It Is Often Something More Exact.
Your Confusion Is Not the Problem
People tend to describe certain moments in life with vague language.
They say they feel lost. Out of alignment. Unmoored. Unsure of direction.
The words suggest disorientation, a lack of clarity — as though the problem were simply that the map has gone missing.
But when you listen closely, that is rarely what is going on.
More often, what people are describing is a growing sense that the life they are living no longer equals to what feels fundamentally right to them. Not dramatically wrong. Not obviously broken. Just subtle-ly, persistently off.
At that point, the instinct is usually to look for answers outside ourselves.
We search for a new plan. A new role. A different configuration of the same elements.
But confusion of this particular kind is rarely caused by a lack of options. It is not the result of us not knowing enough or suddenly being unable to map out a plan due to poor strategic thinking.
It tends to appear when something deeper has slipped out of alignment — slowly enough for it to be easy to ignore at first.
Why the Work Begins Elsewhere
This is why, in my work, the process of knowing your next steps — finding your way forward —does not begin with goals or direction.
It begins with returning to your foundation.
For this, I work with a framework that unfolds in four phases:
Root → Reveal → Refine → Relate
The first phase, Root, is also the one most people try to bypass. Not because it is unimportant, but because it requires a kind of attention that cannot be rushed. That demands something from you.
Root concerns itself with values, among a few things.
Both the values a person consciously identifies with, and the ones that reveal themselves through friction.
It is impossible to avoid feeling your values, if you are not honoring them.
If you are trying to short-circuit your values or dismantle them, a gap between what one believes to be important and what one’s life currently makes room for, appears.
It is often in that gap that discomfort, pain and confusion, arise — and where the work must begin.
On Values, as They Are Lived
Most people believe they know their values.
They have thought about them, at least in passing. They can usually name a few. Family. Freedom. Integrity. Curiosity. Stability.
But unless that hierarchy has been examined deliberately, it tends to operate in the background, revealing itself only indirectly.
Through irritation that seems disproportionate to the situation. Or fatigue that rest does not resolve. Or through a persistent sense of inner resistance — even when things appear, by most external measures, to be going well.
This is often the first place where dissonance shows itself.
Someone may say that family is their highest value, while structuring their life in a way that leaves almost no space for it — and feel an ongoing strain they cannot quite explain.
Another may speak warmly of autonomy or creativity, yet remain in systems that steadily erode both — and wonder why their motivation has disappeared.
What makes this difficult to see is that nothing feels immediately catastrophic.
Life rarely announces these misalignments.
It just slowly slides.
How People Drift Without Noticing
Early in life, this sliding is not only common but necessary. Experimentation is how one learns. One tries things. One adjusts. For a period of time, we move toward what seems interesting or promising.
Eventually, something works.
Momentum builds. Commitments accumulate. Your life begins to take shape.
You take on more responsibility. You commit to people, a role, a professional path and plans. Life slowly takes on a form of its own.
And it can look — convincingly — as though one has carried oneself intact into this arrangement. That one’s values have simply come along for the ride.
Until a moment arrives when that assumption no longer holds.
Not because a single decision was wrong, but because a series of reasonable choices added up to something that no longer feels true.
This is often when people begin to say they feel lost.
What they usually mean is something more precise: that they are no longer living in accordance with what matters most to them, now.
A Personal Interruption
I know this pattern because I have lived it.
I spent almost a decade in the United States. I moved there originally out of a desire for exploration, independence, and growth — values that were very real to me at the time. They mattered. They deserved space.
And for many years, that life fit. It was quite an adventure, and a life that felt full of meaning and joy.
But gradually, something else began to assert itself. Not as a clear thought or decision, but as a feeling I could not quite explain.
A pull.
I experiened it as a growing awareness that something essential was no longer being met.
Family had always been important to me. That value had not disappeared while I was away. It simply expressed itself differently — through chosen family, through weekly phone calls home, through an effort to stay connected across distance.
But over time, that was no longer enough.
The season had changed.
And once that became clear, it was impossible for me to ignore that dissonance without paying the price.
Looking back, what I experienced was not confusion about what to do next. It was the accumulated weight of living out of alignment with a value that now felt present and significant in a whole new way. It required me to pay attention.
Where Values Come From
Perhaps you have a reasonable question, at this point: where do values actually come from?
There is no single answer.
Some psychological theories suggest that values follow broad, universal patterns, shaped by culture but not invented by it. Others point to the idea that certain needs — autonomy, competence, connection — are psychologically fundamental, or values are almost hardwired in us, and they are becoming visible primarily when we are frustrated by not living in accordance.
Still other perspectives emphasize lived experience: the way values clarify themselves through action, tension, and consequence. Through what hurts when we ignore it. Through what continues to resurface, even when we attempt to reason our way around it.
I am not especially concerned with settling this debate.
In practice, values appear less as theories and more as signals.
They announce themselves when they are violated. They persist when ignored. They create friction when life pulls in a direction that does not feel honest.
In this sense, values function as a language for intuition — not intuition as something mystical, but intuition made legible.
Root Is More Than a List
This is also why Root, in my work, is not limited to identifying values alone.
It includes attention to what currently lights up a person, where their energy gathers and where it drains, and — crucially — which season of life they are in.
Because values are not static.
They form a living hierarchy, constantly renegotiated by time, circumstance, and responsibility.
There are seasons that call for autonomy and exploration. Others that call for consolidation, care, or belonging. Seasons of expansion. Seasons of integration. Seasons of return.
Disorientation often occurs when one attempts to live a new season by the rules of an old one.
Who This Kind of Work Is For
This kind of work is not for people looking for instructions.
It is for people who sense that the answers they are looking for cannot come from the outside.
People who are not confused because they lack intelligence or ambition — but because they are standing at a point in life where old orientations no longer apply.
People who have lived enough to know that being told what to do is rarely helpful — and often actively wrong.
What they are missing is not advice.
It is a way of meeting themselves honestly, at the exact point they are in.
What Becomes Possible After Root
I have built a structured process.
Not to tell anyone who they are or what they should choose — but to create a clear, grounded way of meeting oneself when everything feels uncertain.
Root is that place.
It is the most fundamental work you can do when you don’t know what is up or down in your own life.
Because while it can feel overwhelming to ask the biggest questions — What actually matters most? What am I orienting my life around? — something important happens the moment you begin.
You don’t get perfect clarity.
But you do start an excavating proces to uncover what is essential, and what will be your north star.
And once that north star is in place, many things become noticeably easier.
Not because the practical circumstances suddenly disappear — they rarely do — but because the direction itself is no longer in doubt.
I have experienced this more than once in my own life.
When I eventually realized that being closer to my family was not just “nice to have,” but essential, the decision to leave the United States — after almost a decade — became clear, even though it was logistically and emotionally complex.
I was saying goodbye to a country that had shaped me, to friendships, to a marriage that was ending, to a professional life I had built over years.
None of that was easy.
But the direction itself was not confusing.
Once I accepted what mattered most, I could move intuitively toward it, even through difficulty.
The same thing happened later, in a professional context. Standing in a workplace where I no longer felt at home, I could feel — very clearly — which values were no longer being honored.
Autonomy. Integrity. The ability to stand behind the work I was doing.
When those disappeared, the decision to leave was not actually hard.
What was hard was letting go of the idea of what the job could have been — not the reality of what it was.
Root work gives you that kind of clarity. It becomes a filter through which you can see situations for what they contain — and what they do not. It helps you distinguish between real possibilities and fantasies you are holding onto out of habit, fear, or hope.
A simple analogy makes this concrete (I credit and thank Simon Sinek, for this!).
If you are told to go to the store and buy everything — candy, soda, steak, celery — you will feel overwhelmed. You won’t know what to choose.
But if you already know that health is your guiding value, the decision is obvious.
You buy the celery.
Root does the same thing for life.
It doesn’t remove complexity. It removes confusion. And once confusion is gone, forward movement becomes not only possible — but far more humane.
This is why Root is not optional work. It is the foundation.
The place where you stop outsourcing your orientation to circumstances, expectations, or other people’s opinions — and begin listening to what has been trying to get your attention all along.
Not because anyone else knows better. But because you do.
And this is where learning to trust that knowledge begins.
What I didn’t understand back then was that clarity doesn’t come from finding the right answer — it comes from understanding what you’re answering from.
If you want to go deeper and slow things down and work with this in practice, head over to my Substack to read What I Wish I’d Known Before I Tried to Figure Out My Next Step .
Here, I invite you into the exact process I now use to get clear on my values, when something feels off. This is a paid piece.
You can also explore these themes through conversation and story in my podcast, Dancing in the dark.
