There’s a story about a man crawling around on his hands and knees on the sidewalk one night. A neighbor comes over and asks:

“What are you doing down there?”

“I lost my keys!”

“That’s terrible! You dropped them around here?”

“No. I think I dropped them back there near the door to my building.”

“So why aren’t you looking for them back there?

“I can’t see back there because it’s dark. But there’s a streetlight here so at least I can see!”

No matter what age we are, we have experience and wisdom. Even when we feel lost, we have what we need to find our next step forward. But more often than not, we don’t know how to look inside.

So we look for answers outside, in courses, books, talks, workshops… We consume more-and-more content, certain that somewhere out there, under the streetlight, we’ll find the answer we’re looking for.

But the one place we’re not looking is inside ourselves, because it seems too dark.

In school we were taught how to consume knowledge, not how to learn from our own experience and wisdom. We were taught how to search for answers in libraries and the internet, but not to trust our inner knowing. We were taught to trust teachers and experts—not to trust ourselves.

Like the man in the story, we often look for answers in all the wrong places.

We’ll find what we need to know much faster when we learn how to search within—by learning the skills to shed light in places we didn’t even know were there.

These real skills are learnable. Skills to bring awareness to the inner place, access what you already have, and practice navigating “what’s next?” with agency and well-being. The more you practice, the better you will feel about yourself, the people around you, and the purposeful steps you take.

(Photo by Marco Trassini on Unsplash)

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