Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

by Martha N. Beck

Transitions begin, deep down, the minute you set out to live a life that doesn’t jibe with your essential self. Over time, the dissonance, the sense of never being who you really are, starts to bother you. A lot. In fact, it finally becomes intolerable. Even though everything may look fine to the people around you, your essential self is torn and dying.

I believe my essential self has been pleading for me to go out and explore more. To travel, explore, learn, and connect with people. I was killing my essential self when I’d stay inside my bubble, in my room, when there’s so many experiences outside of it waiting for me to reach out, to step out.

clients who launch themselves into a new life often tell me they feel that they’ve gone “back to square one.” Though they could’ve sworn that they were moving forward, they feel as though everything they’ve ever learned or experienced has suddenly evaporated. They grieve desperately over the loss of familiar roles and situations, all the time bumbling around in their new lives like scared, clumsy infants. Believe it or not, this is a good thing.

Square One is a time of fundamental death and rebirth, the period during which you mourn your old life and begin to explore your new one. The wonderful thing about this is that it gives you a chance to choose a new identity. Freed from your old life patterns, you can seek, find, and embrace your essential self much more easily than you could before everything went haywire.

During this part of the change process, you’ll start having ideas you couldn’t have conceived of before the catalytic event changed everything and you lived through the topsy-turvy roller coaster of Square One. If you’ve truly tuned in to your essential self and are using your built-in navigational equipment, the dreams you dream during this time will be visions of the life you were meant to live.

Square Two: dreaming and scheming...

At first, these ideas will be wispy and impractical, just idle thoughts about an idealized future. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have my own house,” you’ll think. If this idea comes from your essential self, it will take root in your mind and start sending out little shoots.

Square Two is the time to create a blueprint for anything in your new life, whether that means deciding on the kind of person you want to marry, the lean-and-mean physique you’d like to develop, or the business you’re going to start in your garage. This always begins with an inner vision and gradually moves into the real world.

Yes, there are a trillion and one ways for things to go awry as you make your way through your own heroic saga, and you’ll feel as though you’re experiencing all of them. This doesn’t mean that your dreams are misguided, or that they won’t come true. It just means you’ll have to modify the scheme you created in Square Two—possibly several times. That’s the nature of any hero’s saga, and knowing what to expect makes it slightly more bearable.

Now that you’re actually living the life you’ve dreamed about—creating a dream career in a dream environment with dream companions—your job is to refine and perfect operations so that they work more and more smoothly. You eliminate redundancies, cut out unnecessary work, reduce the time it takes to do a given task, and increase your level of enjoyment. In short, you smooth out the kinks.

People who become too complacent about the promised land, assuming that it will last forever, are setting themselves up for a fall. Below the horizon lurks an unforeseen Something, a brand-new catalytic event that will one day bust into the peace and quiet of Square Four and send you reeling into Square One all over again.

In reality, each phase of the cycle blends gradually into the next. The chaotic aspects of death and rebirth are worst at the beginning of Square One, gradually giving way to moments of optimism as you begin to dream your way into Square Two. This phase begins with rather fuzzy ideas, which become more detailed and informed as you work your way toward the hero’s saga in Square Three. Once you’ve gone through the initial problems of this phase, you’ll become more and more efficient and relaxed as you get to Square Four, the promised land.

Squares One and Two, the top two squares, take place in the “ideal world.” This means that the work you do in these squares occurs mainly between your lovely little ears. Squares Three and Four, on the other hand, are “real world” areas. You have to roll up your sleeves and work in these phases,

Squares One and Four, on the left side of the cycle, are times for small adjustments, work that won’t squander too much effort where it isn’t beneficial. You don’t want to make huge commitments in Square One, when you’ve barely started out in this new stage of your life, though people often do so.

Squares Two and Three, on the other hand, are the times to make Big Moves. In Square Two, the big moves are still happening in your head—in the “ideal world.” That means that you’re making major plans, testing them out, then totally rethinking them. You play with all kinds of possibilities, dream big, but remain willing to change your ideas at any moment. In Square Three, the big changes happen in the real world.

Once you’ve begun to develop an ability to manage the whole experience of the change process, the constant fluctuations and disastrous misadventures of life will become far less frightening.

Instead of worrying about the fact that society is changing faster than ever before and that tried-and-true institutions are falling apart, you’ll see it as a boon. Freed from rigid social expectations, focused firmly on guidance from your essential self, you will stop conforming to any of the pre-designated patterns offered by your cultural environment.

Instead, you will turn your own life into a work of art: an absolutely original expression of your unique gifts and preferences. You will be not only the work in progress but also the artist. You will reach your own North Star, and stay w...

No matter what they were or how they arrived, they disrupted your life so thoroughly that you could no longer be the person you once were. In short, they shoved you into Square One.

Jennifer of the American Southwest was on death row. The execution day was written on her new contract, on her airplane ticket, on the apartment lease she wasn’t planning to renew. Jennifer was just beginning to understand that you cannot create a new life without destroying the one you’ve got.

Hillary’s “death” occurred when she knew she had to leave the profession her parents desperately wanted for her, losing her identity as their obedient little girl in the process.

Though the features varied, all those faces wore the same expression: gray, tired, empty, inexpressibly sad. I’ve seen that face on every person I know—including myself—who was facing a major identity loss. Even when the change is what we want, entering Square One means enduring loss after loss after loss.

Pretending to be happy or unruffled when your primary identity has suffered a deathblow will only lengthen the sadness, while allowing yourself to feel it will help it dissipate as quickly as possible. Grief slows you down, so you’ll need more time to do even the most mundane tasks. You’ll go through periods of denial, when the sadness eases up a bit, but then it will wash over you again. Identifying your losses, sharing your feelings, and grieving them through is absolutely necessary for preparing you to enjoy your new life.

As you accept your new challenge and your life begins to change, you’ll inevitably leave people behind—people who may be jealous and angry because they want the opportunities you have. Even if you still hang out with your old crowd, you’ll find that you don’t fit in the same way. You no longer identify with the way your pals think, and the topics that fascinate them now seem irrelevant to you.

If this kind of thing happens to you, keep reminding yourself that the best way to help a drowning person is to learn to swim yourself. By mastering the skills and doing the work to reach your own North Star, you make yourself capable of helping other people reach theirs. Share your life-navigation strategies freely; this is far better than holding yourself back so that you and your loved ones can have matching sets of bitterness, regret, and disappointment.

You’ll find that some people grab on to the idea of pursuing their own North Stars, jump into Square One with you, and become even better friends. Those who are hobbled by fear, oppressive social selves, or the illusion of helplessness will continue to begrudge your success no matter what you do. Of course, you won’t stop caring about these people, but don’t wait for them to feel good about your success before you build the life you were meant to live.

Instead of hanging out with people who don’t understand your behavior, spend a large proportion of your time creating an Everybody who’s on your side. Make a daily—even hourly—habit of getting away, going inward, tuning in to your essential self, reading those internal compasses.

Limin is Latin for “threshold,” and a liminal period is a time when you’re on the threshold between identities, neither inside nor out, neither one thing nor the other.

When your whole life is changing, it’s normal to have lots of ideas about what you might do. Rapid attention shifts are typical of liminal periods. Now is the time to play with these ideas, not to lock yourself into ironclad plans. Wait until an idea has felt right for a number of days or weeks before you commit to making it a part of your new life.

Accept that you’re a kindergartner. Learning about a new situation or task requires admitting—sometimes only to yourself, but often to others as well—that you are as rank a beginner as any five-year-old. You’ll be amazed by how much you can learn if you start from this humble position.

Being nobody nowhere, they can become anything and go anywhere. On the threshold, your essential self has more freedom than at any other time or place.

Every time a catalytic event forces you to let go of your identity, you have the chance to go on a vision quest. As the world spins crazily around you, pay attention to what I call the “three N’s”: noticing what you love, narrowing your focus, and, finally, naming the thing you most desire, the identity that fits as though it’s custom-tailored.

It’s like that old joke where the drowning preacher turns away rescuers in a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter, telling them that he doesn’t need them, because he has absolute faith that God will save him. Then he drowns. When he gets to Heaven, he asks God, “Why didn’t you answer my prayers for help?” “I tried!” says God. “I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter!”