Coaching with Stefan
Young Adults & Finding Your Own Way
When everyone seems to have an idea about your future — and you’re still working out what feels right for you.
There can be a lot of questions when you’re starting to make decisions about your own life.
What subjects should I take?
University, apprenticeship or work?
What career?
What if I choose the wrong thing?
What if I disappoint someone?
What if everyone else seems to know where they’re going and I don’t?
You might know exactly what you want.
You might have absolutely no idea.
Or perhaps you know something about the kind of life you want, but can’t yet see how to get there.
You don’t need to have it all figured out.
Sometimes you just need somewhere to think without another person telling you what you should do.
Recognition before explanation
You might recognise…
- “Everyone keeps asking me what I’m going to do. I don’t know yet.”
- “I know what I want, but everyone keeps telling me to be realistic.”
- “I’m doing well, but I’m not sure I actually want the path I’m on.”
- “My parents want the best for me. I’m just not sure their idea of what’s best is the same as mine.”
- “I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”
- “Everyone around me seems to have a plan.”
- “What if I choose something and realise later that it was wrong?”
- “There are things I love doing, but I don’t know whether I can make a life from them.”
- “I’m not even sure what I’m good at.”
There can be a lot of voices around your future.
Parents.
Teachers.
Friends.
Career advisers.
Social media.
People who know you well.
People who barely know you at all.
Most of them may genuinely want the best for you.
But when everybody has an opinion, it can become difficult to hear another voice:
your own.
That doesn’t mean ignoring everybody else.
It doesn’t mean you already know all the answers.
It might simply mean creating enough space to notice what matters to you before making the next decision.
A lived connection
I wanted to be a pop star.
That’s genuinely what I wanted.
I loved music. I played in my bedroom, joined bands and found work experience in a recording studio.
I wanted to be around music.
The problem was that the careers adviser didn’t really know how to help me get there.
My mum and dad understood that I loved music, but they were understandably worried about whether I could build a future around it. I couldn’t read music, and they thought having an education behind me would give me something to fall back on if music didn’t work out.
That made sense.
So I looked for the closest course I could find to what I wanted:
Electronic Music Production.
There was just one problem.
I needed Physics O-level.
And I’d dropped Physics.
One sensible decision led to another.
I took a City & Guilds qualification in electronics and computers, thinking that might get me onto the course the following year.
It didn’t.
Even though the college wrote to say it was equivalent, it wasn’t accepted.
So I took Physics privately and got the grade.
But by then I was already studying for a two-year BTEC OND in Electronics & Communications.
That led to an HND in TV Studio Engineering & Communications.
The strange thing was, I didn’t enjoy those courses.
It felt alien to me.
But I’d put so much into getting there.
I wanted to make my parents proud.
And somewhere inside me I still thought all of this might somehow take me closer to the life I originally wanted.
So I kept going.
Then I got chosen.
When I finished studying, I applied for jobs in TV studio engineering.
Quantel Systems offered me a position as a Project Engineer, installing television studios and equipment.
Some of the academically brighter students from my course had applied too.
They chose me.
As someone who had always thought of himself as fairly average when it came to marks, that meant something.
And after all the work I’d already put in, how could I throw it away now?
They chose me. How could I say no?
So I took the job.
Doing well and feeling right aren’t always the same thing.
Once I started working, I often felt the technical work was over my head.
There was an apprentice who hadn’t followed the college route I had, and he seemed to know far more about the practical work than I did.
That taught me something I hadn’t understood while studying.
There isn’t only one way to learn or become capable.
But I also discovered something else.
I enjoyed travelling.
I enjoyed moving from one project to another.
I had a good social life.
Some parts of the life suited me even when the work itself didn’t.
Looking back, perhaps I had been asking myself one question:
What job should I do?
There was another question I didn’t yet know how to ask:
What kind of life allows me to feel like myself?
Music went quiet. It didn’t disappear.
There wasn’t much room for music during those years.
Work and life were busy.
But when I could afford it, I took singing lessons.
And somewhere in the quieter moments there was a cheap Casio keyboard.
Years later, after I was married and had children, music became a much bigger part of my life again.
I created.
I wrote.
I played.
The dream of becoming a pop star wasn’t necessarily the important part anymore.
The important part was recognising what music, writing and creativity had always given me.
That was my heart singing.
The things you love don’t always have to become your job.
I think this is important.
There’s a lot of pressure to find your passion, turn it into a career and build your life around it.
Life doesn’t always work that way.
Something can matter enormously to you without becoming the way you earn your living.
And sometimes a job can give you other things that matter — freedom, security, travel, people, variety, challenge, time or the ability to support the things you love outside work.
I didn’t understand that when I was younger.
I thought I needed to work out what I was going to be.
Today, I’d probably be more curious about:
What matters to me?
What gives me energy?
What kind of environment suits me?
What parts of myself don’t I want to lose?
Not because those questions produce a perfect answer.
But because they might help you recognise yourself in the decisions you’re making.
The world is changing too
What if the jobs we’re preparing for change?
There is another uncertainty young people are carrying today that wasn’t part of my world at the same age.
AI is changing how work is done, and nobody can say with certainty what the working world will look like by the time someone choosing subjects today is ten or twenty years into their career.
Some jobs may change.
New ones may appear.
Things people once thought were secure may look very different.
That can make an already difficult question feel even bigger:
How am I supposed to choose my future when nobody really knows what the future of work will look like?
I don’t think pretending we know the answer helps.
Perhaps it makes knowing something about yourself even more important.
What are you curious about?
What do you enjoy learning?
What kind of problems interest you?
What environments bring something out of you?
What matters enough that you want to keep it with you, even if the world around you changes?
You don’t need to predict the future perfectly before you begin.
You can learn, adapt, change direction and continue discovering what fits as the world changes too.
Your next decision doesn’t have to decide your whole life.
Choosing subjects matters.
Qualifications matter.
University, apprenticeships and first jobs can matter.
But none of them need to contain the complete story of who you’re going to become.
A decision can take you somewhere.
It can also teach you something.
You may discover what you’re good at.
You may discover what you don’t enjoy.
You may meet people who change your direction.
You may find that something you thought you wanted doesn’t fit anymore.
You may return to something you loved years later.
Changing direction doesn’t necessarily mean the earlier direction was wasted.
Sometimes you’re simply learning more about yourself.
Your Life. Your Call.
Among all the voices, can you still hear your own?
You don’t have to ignore your parents.
You don’t have to reject the sensible option.
And you don’t have to turn every passion into a career.
But somewhere amongst what everyone else thinks you could, should or ought to do, there should be room for you too.
A useful question might not be:
“What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
Perhaps, for now, it’s simply:
What feels like the next step that belongs to me?
A conversation first
You don’t need to have your future figured out before we talk.
A conversation with Stefan.
Somewhere to talk about what you’re thinking, what other people are expecting, what matters to you and what you’re not sure about yet.
I’m not here to choose your course, university, job or future for you.
The decisions remain yours.
Sometimes it just helps to have somewhere you can hear yourself think.
An unhurried twenty-minute conversation. Nothing needs to be decided.