Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Key Takeaways
- People often feel stuck due to a lack of clear and meaningful goals, which makes decision-making difficult.
- Fear of failure or success, as well as meaningless goals, hinder consistent action and commitment.
- Clarity about goals can feel intimidating, but it is essential for progress; vague goals keep people from taking risks.
- To gain clarity, create a framework based on your values, environment needs, and broader life vision.
- Investing time in self-reflection helps ensure that actions taken align with genuine desires, ultimately saving time and effort.
Why Am I Not Taking Action?
There are a few words that always come up when I talk to people who are unhappy in their jobs or stuck in their business. They say they feel “stuck”, “lost”, “directionless”. They know something needs to change but they can’t seem to make it happen.
There are many reasons why action stalls: fear of failure, fear of looking stupid, fear of making mistakes and – ironically – fear of success. But in my experience, the biggest reason why people aren’t taking consistent action is simpler than any of those.
They don’t have a clear and meaningful goal they’re working towards.
If you don’t know where you’re heading, how will you ever get there?
Missing or meaningless goals
If you have no clear goal in front of you, you’ll have no criteria for choosing between projects or making decisions. You’ll have no way to defend your choices when well-meaning friends and family question them. And you’ll have no way to know when you’ve actually achieved something, because you don’t know what you’re working towards.
Without a meaningful goal, commitment is almost impossible. You’re not sure what you’re doing this for or why it matters – so it’s easy to delay, distract yourself, or simply not start.
But there’s another version of this problem that’s equally common: working towards the wrong goal.
The wrong goal is a goal based on incorrect assumptions, restrictive underlying beliefs, or someone else’s priorities. If your goal isn’t genuinely yours – if it’s the goal you think you should want, or the one that seems most logical, or the one that would impress the people around you – then one of two things will happen.
Either you won’t be motivated to work towards it, because at some level you know it’s not what you actually want. Or you will work hard towards it – because that’s what you do – and you’ll achieve it. And then you’ll look up and ask yourself: now what? That hollow feeling after ticking the box of a goal you didn’t really want is one of the most disorienting experiences I hear about from clients.
Why clarity feels harder than it should
There’s a reason people avoid getting clear on what they want. Clarity feels like a commitment. If you name the goal, you have to go after it – and then you might fail. Staying vague keeps you safe.
There’s also a pervasive idea that you need to have a perfect, detailed vision of the next decade of your life before you can take any action at all. That’s paralysing – and impossible. You can’t know everything sitting behind your computer. Things will evolve as you explore, learn, and discover what’s actually out there.
A goal doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be clear enough to be useful.
How to get clear enough to move
Rather than trying to define the perfect destination, try building a framework – a set of criteria that can guide your decisions. Here are some questions worth sitting with:
What are your non-negotiables? The maximum hours you want to work, the kind of environment you need, the minimum income that makes this viable.
What kind of environment do you thrive in? Working alone or with others, having clear structure or open freedom, being out in the world or deep in focused work.
What are your fundamental values? What would any future role, organisation, or business need to reflect – creativity, independence, stability, freedom, leadership, integrity?
How does this fit into the rest of your life? More time for family, genuine time off at weekends, space for the things that matter beyond work.
What is the bigger picture – what does a good life actually look like for you, not just a good career?
You won’t have perfect answers to all of these immediately. That’s fine. The point is to start building a framework rather than waiting for certainty to arrive.
Taking your one step
I know it’s tempting to skip this part and go straight to action. When you’ve been feeling stuck for a while, the urge to just do something – anything – is strong. But if you go steaming ahead without knowing what you’re moving towards, you’ll either get nowhere at all or you’ll get somewhere that’s no better than where you started.
As Seneca put it: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
Allow yourself proper time to reflect before you act. Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you work out what’s really important to you. That investment in clarity will save you an enormous amount of time and effort further down the line.
The one step worth taking right now isn’t necessarily the next action in your business or career. It might be the step of getting honest about what you actually want.
The most common reason is not having a clear and meaningful goal to work towards. Without one, there’s nothing to commit to – and it’s easy to stay in a holding pattern of planning, thinking, and researching without actually moving. Fear plays a role too, but lack of clarity usually underlies it.
Before trying to force yourself into action, check whether you actually know what you’re working towards and why it matters to you. If the goal isn’t clear or genuinely yours, motivation will always be fragile. Get clear on the destination first – even a rough direction – and action tends to follow more naturally.
A wrong goal is one that’s based on what you think you should want rather than what you actually want – someone else’s definition of success, a logical next step that doesn’t excite you, or an achievement that looks good from the outside but doesn’t resonate internally. Achieving the wrong goal often leaves people feeling as stuck as before, just in a different place.
Start with a framework rather than a fixed answer. What are your non-negotiables? What kind of environment do you thrive in? What values need to be present for work to feel meaningful? These questions don’t give you a perfect destination but they give you criteria – and criteria are enough to start making better decisions.
Completely normal. Feeling stuck is often a sign that you’re trying to move forward without enough clarity about where you’re going. It’s not a character flaw or a lack of willpower – it’s a navigation problem. The solution isn’t to push harder but to get clearer.
If you’re stuck in your business and not sure what’s holding you back, the free Solopreneur Diagnostic shows you in five minutes where your business is strong and where it’s quietly getting in the way.
And if you want to work through the bigger questions of direction and clarity alongside a small group of established solopreneurs, Off Script is the community built for exactly that.
6 responses
This text is all I needed today, thanks for guiding me into the direction of reflecting & exploring!
Hurrah! Happy exploring 🙂
Thank you for this post. It is 2022 and it is still relevant as ever. I got to the last sentence and cried, I hope I get clear on what it is I am trying to achieve and take the action that I need to. God bless you
I’m glad it resonated Liz! You’re certainly not alone. What are you going to do try to get that clarity that you’re missing?
Thankyou for the Inspiration and Great Quote which is now posted on my computer screen!😊
Hurrah! love it, glad it resonated.