Every week I meet people who know something has to change.
Some need to move more. Some need to set healthier boundaries. Some feel stuck in a job they no longer enjoy. Others have slowly drifted away from the person they once were—or the person they still wish they could be.
Yet many respond the same way.
They wait.
Sometimes until pain forces them to change. Sometimes until burnout leaves them no other choice. Sometimes until life makes the decision for them.
The strange thing is, those moments rarely come out of nowhere.
Just like most dog bites don’t happen out of nowhere either. They’re often the result of minutes, days, weeks, months—or even years—of ignored signals.
More often, those moments are simply the point where we can’t ignore the signals anymore because they’ve become impossible to overlook.
I know that because it happened to me.
Years ago, I waited until my body forced me to slow down before I finally admitted that something had to change. There’s a longer version of that story elsewhere, but locking back, one lesson stands out above all the others:
People can support you.
They can guide you.
They can make the journey less lonely.
But they can’t change your life for you.
Matthew Hussey once said:
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand how foolish it is to think you can change someone else.
Matthew Hussey
The opposite is true as well.
If changing ourselves is already difficult, why would we expect someone else to do it for us?
Since then, both in my own life and in my work as a physiotherapist, my perspective has shifted.
I no longer believe you need to redesign your entire life overnight — and it’s impossible anyway.
Instead, I think lasting change comes down to four simple principles:
- Know where you’re heading.
- Grow an identity that supports that direction.
- Run small experiments.
- React to feedback, adjust, and repeat.
None of them are particularly complicated.
Together, they form a feedback loop that’s quietly changed the way I make decisions.
1. Where am I going? 🚶🏻♀️
Before changing anything, ask yourself a simple question:
If nothing changed over the next five years, would you be happy with where your life is heading?
I like this question because it invites reflection instead of demanding an immediate solution.
You don’t need to know exactly what your future should look like. Most of us don’t.
In fact, none of us has a crystal ball. But you should have a rough sense of the direction you’d like to move in.
One thing that has helped me is thinking in a few broad life categories rather than trying to optimize everything at once.
Health.
Learning.
Business.
Yours might be relationships, finances, creativity, spirituality, family, career, or something completely different.
Your categories don’t have to look like mine. The point isn’t to find the right categories. The point is to reduce the noise.
It’s similar to a to-do list.
When everything feels important, nothing really is.
Clarity rarely comes from adding more.
It usually comes from deciding what matters most.
The same applies here.
A handful of meaningful categories provides enough direction without pretending to have your entire life planned out.
That mindset helped me during one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made.
During the COVID pandemic, I found myself standing between two very different futures.
I had already applied for the physiotherapy entry exam, but I had no idea whether I’d actually get accepted.
At the same time, I was offered a secure job in a COVID laboratory. After working in tourism for five years, my biology degree was finally going to be useful—or so I thought.
On paper, the decision seemed obvious.
In my head, it wasn’t.
Whenever I imagined myself spending the next five or ten years in a laboratory, something felt wrong. The job wasn’t bad. It simply wasn’t the life I wanted to build.
So I declined the secure offer and waited for the entry exam results instead.
Looking back, I wasn’t really choosing between two jobs.
I was choosing between two futures.
One exercise that helped me came from the Odyssey Plan.
Instead of asking, “What should I do?”, it asks a different question:
- What would my life look like five years from now if I stayed on my current path?
- What would it look like if I chose a different one?
- And if money and other people’s expectations weren’t part of the equation, what kind of life would I build then?
I actually went through these questions when I was deciding between those two futures.
Today, I rarely sit down and formally answer them anymore.
Over time, they’ve simply become part of how I think—and how I reflect on my decisions.
Whenever I’m facing a difficult decision, I naturally imagine different versions of the future and ask myself which one feels most aligned with the life I want to create.
You can’t navigate without knowing your destination.
But you also don’t need the entire route before taking the first step.
So now ask yourself:
Which future are you moving towards?
2. Who am I becoming? 🥸
Knowing where you want to go is only half the equation.
The next question is just as important:
Who do I need to become to naturally move in that direction?
Direction gives you something to move towards.
Identity determines what you do when nobody is watching.
I’ve noticed this not only in my own life, but also in my work as a physiotherapist.
Patients who focus only on reaching a destination often struggle when progress slows down. But patients who begin to see themselves as someone who takes care of their health usually keep going. Missing one workout no longer feels like failure. It feels like a small detour before getting back to the routine they’ve built.
The same applies outside of rehabilitation.
Today, I don’t really have to convince myself to read.
Or to write.
Or to go for a run or in the gym.
Not because I have extraordinary discipline (trust me, I don’t 🤫).
But because those things have quietly become part of my identity.
That doesn’t mean I always feel like doing them.
It simply means I no longer have to negotiate with myself every single day.
Identity isn’t about pretending to be someone you’re not.
It’s about asking yourself:
“What would someone who wants this life naturally do next?”
Your answer doesn’t have to be perfect.
It just has to move you in the right direction.
So instead of asking,
“What should I do?”
try asking,
“Who do I want to become?”
Then let your next decision answer that question.
The five-year questions help you find your direction.
Once you know who you’re becoming, you don’t need to keep asking them anymore.
The next step isn’t another question.
It’s a small experiment.
3. What’s the Smallest Experiment I Could Run? 🧪
Knowing where you’re heading gives you direction.
Knowing who you’re becoming helps you stay on course.
But neither matters if you never act.
So instead of asking yourself,
“What’s the right decision?”
try asking,
“What’s the smallest experiment I could run?”
This idea completely changed how I approach uncertainty.
When I applied for physiotherapy, I didn’t tell myself, “This is what I’ll do for the rest of my life.”
I told myself something much smaller.
“I’ll give it one year.”
Suddenly, it wasn’t a life-changing commitment anymore.
It became an experiment.
Since then, I’ve started treating almost every major decision—and many smaller ones—the same way.
I do it in my business.
I do it in my writing.
And I do it with my patients.
When someone comes to me with knee pain, I usually have a hypothesis about what’s causing it.
But it’s still just that—a hypothesis.
So we test it.
We try an exercise.
We adjust the load.
We observe what happens over the next few weeks.
Sometimes I’m right.
Sometimes I’m wrong.
Either way, we learn something.
The next time another patient walks through my door with a similar problem, I don’t have to start from scratch. I’ve already learned something that helps me make a better decision.
That’s the beauty of experiments.
You don’t have to be right from the beginning.
You just have to be willing to learn.
One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that reality teaches you things thinking never can.
You can spend months imagining how something will feel.
Or you can spend one afternoon finding out.
Engineers don’t expect their first prototype to be perfect (and neither do I anymore).
They build.
They test.
They improve.
Life works surprisingly well the same way.
Ask yourself:
What do you do with what you’ve learned?
4. What Did I Learn? 🎓
Every experiment gives you feedback.
The question is:
What did this experiment teach me?
Notice that I didn’t ask,
“Did it work?”
Success isn’t the goal.
Information gathering is.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating every new piece of information as a reason to change direction.
But that’s rarely how good systems work.
Think of a ship crossing the ocean.
The captain doesn’t choose a new destination every time the waves push the ship slightly off course.
They make small adjustments.
The destination stays the same.
The route changes.
I’ve found it much more useful to think about life the same way.
After trying something new, I usually ask myself questions like:
- What happened?
- What surprised me?
- What should I keep doing?
- What should I change?
Notice that changing something comes last.
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
Sometimes I simply keep the information in the back of my mind and watch what happens next.
Not every piece of feedback requires an immediate adjustment.
Sometimes the best decision is to keep gathering information.
This way of thinking reminds me of the military’s After Action Review.
The goal isn’t to decide whether the plan was good or bad—or to figure out who should be blamed.
The goal is to understand what happened well enough to make the next decision a little better.
That’s exactly how I think about my patients.
It’s how I approach training.
It’s how I build my business.
And it’s how I try to live my life.
Over time, I realized something fascinating.
Our bodies work the same way.
They constantly gather information.
They adapt.
They adjust.
Maybe that’s why this framework works.
Is that how we build a life we love?
📝 Key takeaways
- Know your direction.
- Grow an identity that supports that direction.
- Run experiments instead of searching for certainty.
- Gather information before changing course.
Thanks for spending this time with me. Keep exploring, stay open to new ideas, and remember—growth is a journey, not a destination.
Take care,
Carina 🦊