You're Not Lost: An Inspired Action Plan for Finding Your Own Way

by Maxie McCoy

There is an escape route from this quicksand of confusion you’re feeling, the one that threatens your ability to move forward.

Contrary to what you think, feeling lost is actually a wildly wonderful thing. These crap feelings are a part of your process for achieving clarity. Breaking points break you open. They lead you to the light. If you never face these feelings, you’ll never have the option to rebuild a path you’re fully pumped about.

Breaking points break you open. They lead you to the light.

goods. You were promised that if you followed all the “right” steps, then everything would come together and your future would appear magically with each check on your list of accomplishments. We all believed it, passionately.

But the truth is, we’re living in a world that obsesses over achievement and outcomes and misses the messy process of the journey entirely.

Here’s what you do need: a deep, deep sense of self-belief. We’re talking an ocean of it, swelling to the stars. It’s the single most important skill that you’re missing in this moment, and the only one that will catapult you into trusting where you’re going even if you can’t actually see where it ends. Plus, it’ll ensure that you enjoy the process of getting there.

Let history remember that I gave you the actual definition of confidence, which is the level in which you believe your actions will have a positive outcome.

This is important because so much of finding your way is trusting that what you do today will lead you somewhere you want to be tomorrow. Your path, the one you’re freaking out about, the one you’re confused about where it’s headed . . . it’ll show up when you return to yourself. You’ll realize that you’ve got the skills, and the determination, and the talent to do whatever you want to do. You’ve got what it takes. It’s simply a matter of learning to trust that and trust yourself.

LOST IS A FEELING. It is not who you are. It does not define you.

“Work every damn day to be the highest possible expression of yourself,” I told her. Because when you do, you’ll attract all the right people and opportunities to your path in ways that didn’t previously seem possible.

What three things set you apart or make you feel different from most of your peers?

Empathic, curious, ambitious

List five women who are unapologetically themselves. Look to these women anytime you’re second-guessing yourself.

RBG, Oprah, Eleanor Roosevelt, Natalie Portman,

Let’s just say that a few months after I ended this job, my sister’s first response was, “I’m so glad to have the real you back.”

When someone is consciously or unconsciously squashing your self-expression—whether that’s a partner, family member, boss, friend, or just the goddamn internet—you’ve got to fight like hell to gain distance from it. Because you need your differences, your true expressed self, as much as the world does.

You’re so focused on everyone else that you don’t see everything that you’ve done and everything you’ve created and everything you are that’s going to get you exactly where you are supposed to be.

“You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be,”

When you’re feeling lost, you’re actually on a glorious pathway of examination. And the process of finding answers is something that you can’t always force. They reveal themselves along the way, and on a timeline that is anything but short. Getting to where you want to be is going to take way longer than you expected and way longer than you’d like. You’re not behind, you’re not off track, and you’re not going to feel this way forever. You’re simply on your way.

If you’ve ever listened to someone who’s in the midst of what they consider to be a major misstep, often there’s a total lack of self-compassion and plenty of lamenting. It’s painful to hear, because all they can do is beat themselves up for what they’re doing or not doing.

“I look myself in the mirror every morning and I say, ‘Girl, I love you and I would totally fuck you.’ That’s how I do it.”

Success won’t make you happy, but happiness will make you successful.

For a while I refused to contemplate these questions because I was so scared of the answers.

Follow that spark, no matter how fleeting and how small.

Somewhere along the way, you likely looked at the things that excite or energize you and deemed them unimportant because you didn’t know where they could lead or you didn’t see value in activating those expressions of your own talents. But that was dead wrong. You’ve got to follow those sparks even when you don’t have an understanding of the big vision that they might be leading you to.

If it was actually as simple as that, you would have done it already. And if it was actually the answer, you wouldn’t be reading this book.

When I looked back on my life through the lens of what I had been writing about in that class, I realized I had always cared about those things. Like, always always.

But for some reason I never took the time to identify that this is what was giving me megawatt energy.

Following what energizes you will open up the future path for you too. No matter what hell of lost you feel like you’re swimming through, it’s getting you to here.

Forget the goal. Follow the energy, follow the excitement, follow the spark. It won’t lead you astray. It can’t. Because it’s you.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAÏS NIN

The term growth mindset was first coined by renowned Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck,1 and it’s a major indicator of confidence because those with a growth mindset know that their skills are a work in progress. They know that just because they’re not good at something doesn’t mean they never will be.

likely, your path in life sprouts from your God-fearing determination to stay on it, figure it out, and try to get better come hell or high water.

To change your life for the better, you’re going to be required to suck, and to become OK with that. It’s going to require that you sign up for things that you may not feel you are talented at. It’s going to demand that you step out of your lane not once, but many, many, many, many, many times.

People who are really good at what they do continue to shift and grow because they’re obsessed with surrounding themselves with people who are better—way better—in an effort to become better themselves.

Ava didn’t pick up a camera until she was thirty-two, and aspired to be a journalist and a lawyer before any of that.

Someone else’s path is not yours. Someone else’s timeline is not yours. Someone else’s outcome is not yours.

Your people want to support your success. And if they’re not supporting you, they’re not your people.

One of the greatest investments you can make in your future is in the women who will get you into action today.

You want a friend who is going to be more excited about your success than you are, because she has enough of her own.

However, the external validation that we’re talking about here is reinforcing everything you already are and helping you to see that greatness; it’s not about asking you to change anything. That’s the difference (and an important one at that).

Deep relationships with women who believe in me. Period. The end.

That’s what happens to us every day, she explains. You have to keep coming back to what recharges you, or you end up in the red and you get all frazzled.

Visualizing the process of success, rather than its outcome, is the real power behind this technique.

When you consistently come back to a place of being batshit grateful (as I like to call it), you’re literally training your brain to feel all the amazing feels of enough.

We brainwash ourselves into believing that successful and confident people don’t also doubt themselves immensely.

That awareness, often, is the solution. It’s not FEWER uncomfortable feelings that we should expect. It’s simply knowing, identifying, and being aware of those feelings, seeing them for what they are, and going headfirst into action anyways.

“If you’re in your comfort zone, you’re probably not taking over the world.”

But what’s actually happening is that you are being asked to meet the size of your dreams.

Even the Maya Angelou (Nobel laureate, activist, and poet) famously shared, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

While you have no clue who this person is, you don’t doubt the conversation for a second. They’re comfortable, they’re owning it, and thus they must literally own the place. It is the owner, obviously. You know it almost instantly.

Much of why this works has to do with our body’s ability to affect our confidence rather than the other way around. We’re so used to letting our feelings predict our actions, but actually we can minimize our doubt, fear, and hesitancy by letting our actions lead us to confidence. It’s known as the principle of act as if.3