Let Yourself Wonder What's Next
After grief comes the dreaming stage—where glimmers and nudges point you toward what’s next. You’re not lost. You’re re-forming.
If you haven’t yet read the first post in the Navigating Change series, start here.
For those of us itching to jump straight into action, the next phase of the change cycle is challenging. It can be hard for us, even culturally, to be willing to give ourselves the time to dream before making a change. Everyone wants to know “what’s next!?” After the grief and rebirth of Stage 1, Stage 2 demands something harder to measure: stillness. It requires patience, a creative pause. If you let it be, though, it’s the fun part…
The time when you get to dream and scheme what might come next without the pressure to act on it.
After everything dissolves (the job, the identity, the version of you that played by the rules), this is where things start to shift. You’ll start to reorder your outer world to look more like your new inner world. Not in a big, bold, take-action kind of way. More like soft glimmers of what could be: a word, a color, a craving to move or try something new. A sudden desire to spend time with trees. Or a nudge to Google something you’ve never been interested in before.
It may not fully make sense yet. That’s the point. This isn’t logic. It’s imagination waking up.
After I processed the loss of my job back in 2014, a world of possibilities started to feel open to me. I spent a good amount of time researching MAs in Poetry at various European universities. I imagined what it would be like to shift into retail. I toyed with renewing my expired teaching credential. Suddenly, the world of career possibilities felt open to me again in a it hadn’t even months before.
I still wonder sometimes where I’d be if I actually pursued that poetry degree. Maybe living a very romantic life in Paris. Maybe published. Maybe unemployed. Who knows? The point is that there are options, and if you let yourself…it’s a wonderful time to dream and plan for Stage 3, where the dreams become action.
But for now, this isn’t the time to make things happen. It’s the time to listen. You’re not “doing nothing.” You’re re-forming.
And that part of you, the one who already knows what you’re here to become — your North Star — is quietly dropping clues. You just have to slow down enough to notice them.
In Stage 2, it’s common to think things like:
“What if I tried something totally different?”
“I keep picturing myself ____________... is that weird?”
“I don’t know what this means yet, but I feel drawn to it.”
This is the part of the change cycle where something new wants to emerge, but it doesn’t come with instructions.
For today: If you weren’t trying to be realistic, what would you let yourself imagine? What would it look like to follow your curiosity without a five-year plan?
Give yourself permission to wonder, and let your mind wander where it wants to go.
And if you want support with this or any other stage of the change process, I’d love to help. Learn more at blackwellcoaching.com.