For most of my adult life, I thought having goals meant I had direction. I always had a list — career goals, health goals, financial goals, trips we kept saying we’d take someday. Some years I hit them. Some years I didn’t. Either way, January would arrive and I’d start over, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. What I didn’t realize yet was that you don’t need better goals. You need a direction.
What I didn’t see until much later was that I was making progress without moving in any real direction. I was busy. Productive. Checking things off. From the outside, it probably looked like momentum. But underneath it was a hard-to-name feeling that something was missing. Not unhappy exactly. Not failing. Untethered. Like I was moving constantly without ever really deciding where I wanted my life to go.
If that sounds familiar, I don’t think it’s a motivation problem. I think it’s a navigation problem. Goals tell you where you want to arrive. They don’t tell you which direction to keep moving when the route changes, when the destination no longer fits, or when life upends the week you carefully planned. For that, you need something different. You need a heading.
A heading isn’t a destination. It’s a direction — the orientation you keep returning to even when you can’t see far ahead, even when the path isn’t clear, even when life doesn’t unfold the way you expected. It’s not what you’re trying to have. It’s who you’re becoming and the direction your ordinary life keeps moving, day by day, Tuesday by Tuesday.
The difference between the two shows up most clearly when things go sideways. When you’re running on goals and something disrupts the plan, you feel lost — the destination disappeared and now you don’t know where you are. When you’re running on a heading, the disruption doesn’t erase your direction. You still know which way is forward. You feel redirected, not stranded. And over time, the disruptions themselves start to feel different. Less like proof you’re failing and more like information. A detour. A correction. Something showing you where you are instead of taking you permanently off course. That’s not a mindset you manufacture from a goal list. It grows from having a direction you trust enough to return to.
Goals and Direction Aren’t Opposites
Goals still matter. They give you something concrete to work toward, a way to measure progress, a finish line you can actually cross. And honestly, setting a goal is often how you discover what direction you actually want to go — the pursuing of it teaches you something. But what the goal alone can’t give you is orientation. A goal without a heading under it is a pin on a map with no route. You know where you want to end up, but you have no way to move through the actual terrain of an actual life — all the ordinary Tuesdays and unexpected Fridays that don’t look anything like you planned. The heading is what carries you through those. The lessons you learn along the way, the things you discover about yourself when the plan doesn’t hold — that’s where the real work happens.
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So How Do You Actually Find Your Heading?
Finding your heading isn’t a vision board exercise or a journaling prompt about your dream life — it’s the first real work of what we’ve been building, and We Weren’t Lost. But We Weren’t Quite Found Either is where we introduced it.
The first: what does drift feel like in your actual life right now? Not in theory, not in someone else’s story — in yours. The specific, nameable way your days feel like they belong to everyone else. The way Friday arrives and you can’t quite account for where the week went. The way you’re reacting to everything and choosing almost nothing.
The second: what do you keep coming back to? Not the goals you think you should have, not the aspirations that look right on paper. The quieter signals — the want underneath the want. The thing you keep noticing, keep returning to, keep dismissing as impractical before you let yourself take it seriously.
You don’t need the full picture to find your heading. You need enough direction to make today’s decisions — a sentence you can say out loud that feels undeniably true: this is the direction my life is moving. Not a five-year plan. Not a vision statement. A heading. Something you can use on a Wednesday afternoon when the day is asking you to choose between twenty things and you need to know which way is forward.
That sentence, worked out slowly and honestly over the better part of a year, changed how I made almost every decision. Not because it gave me a roadmap — it didn’t — but because it gave me something to return to. When I drifted from it (and I did, regularly), I knew which way was back. When a decision felt off, I had language for why. When someone asked what I was building, I finally had an answer that was mine.
Most people can name their goals immediately. Very few can clearly name their heading. That gap — between having destinations and having direction — is where a lot of the drift lives.
That difference changes everything.
This fall we’re opening a small group to go through this work together — finding your heading, building capacity, designing a life worth waking up for. Subscribers hear first.