Tracy Stewart loved her government job. She had a good salary, a top-notch retirement plan, and professional respect. But when a speaker at a work event asked her to write down where she wanted her life to be even a year later, she felt something shift. Her heart wasn’t in her career; it was at home, more than 500 miles away.
“I didn’t want to be at this conference away from my babies, my husband back at home,” Stewart told The Epoch Times. “I wanted to be with them.”
Among the challenges of her job was frequent overnight travel, and the conference moment made the cost impossible to ignore.
“I wrote, ‘I want to work from home,'” she said. “‘I want to be at home with my kids.’”
She wasn’t sure how it would be possible, but she’d been praying about it for several weeks—and finally asked God for a sign. When she dropped her daughters off at day care the following day, something unexpected happened that she now considers divine intervention.
The home day care providers for her daughters told her that they were moving out of state and encouraged her to open her own home day care, given her degree in early childhood education. By the end of that day, she’d requested a packet on how to license her home for the day care she’s now operated joyfully for two decades.
Stewart found happiness by being honest about the future—a simple key anyone can use for deciding whether you are on track with the life you want, according to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, board-certified internal medicine physician and founder of Restorasis, a company dedicated to restoring well-being in the workplace.
3 Questions Worth Asking
Dalton-Smith told The Epoch Times that she has a simple three-question formula for determining whether the life you’re living is on course to become the life you desire down the road.
She developed the questions as a simpler variation of a survey that she uses to assess burnout. A few simple questions can be used as a weekly check-in to avoid veering too far from your goals, she said.
1. Is the Work I’m Doing Building What I Want?
There’s a meaningful difference between doing work that matches your mission and doing busy work that lacks value or distracts you from your core desires.
Consider the phase of life you’re in, as that can make a difference in how you categorize your work. For some, raising small children might mean putting more creative or time-intensive projects on the back burner—that’s a legitimate choice, not a failure.
2. Is There Something I’ve Been Doing That I Don’t Need to Keep Doing?
This question can extend beyond career. It captures board positions, volunteer roles that may need to change, and obligations in relationships that may need to be reevaluated if they are leading to burnout. Some things simply need to have an expiration date, Dalton-Smith said.
3. Do I See Myself Doing the Same Thing in 5 Years the Same Way I’m Doing It Now?
If the answer is no, ask yourself why. Then decide what you don’t like and how you can ensure that it doesn’t carry on into the next five years.
Strife, struggle, and personal sacrifice aren’t necessary ingredients to a life of success, Dalton-Smith added. Many become mindlessly accustomed to riding the tide of life without stopping to evaluate where it’s taking them.
“It becomes its own trap to maintain levels of accomplishment that they’ve become accustomed to without really evaluating, ‘Do I like what I’m building and producing, or am I just caught in the cycle of building and producing?'” she said.
Stewart found herself mulling over similar questions as she wrestled with the future. She was talking to friends, her spouse, and to God—and she positioned herself to listen.
Why Honesty About the Future Matters
Research supports what Dalton-Smith has observed in her practice. Being honest about questions related to current feelings and future goals can affect our overall well-being.
A study published in Journal of Research in Personality found that future self-continuity—the degree to which you connect your present self to your future self—was associated with greater meaning in life. In various experiments, participants who wrote about aspects of their lives that remain the same from present to future showed increased future self-continuity, which in turn elevated their reported authenticity and life’s meaning.
The danger of low future self-continuity is that it can cause depression, the study authors noted. On the flip side, those who feel like their true selves and connect to the future tend to make better ethical, financial, and academic decisions.
Dreaming About What Comes Next
Next year, Stewart’s youngest child will graduate from high school. She recently earned a master’s degree and is once again asking herself questions about the future so she can be ready for the next season of her life.
She has some ideas—teaching early childhood classes at a college or providing in-home developmental therapy—and is giving herself permission to dream and be open to the possibilities of change within the next five years.
“I truly feel like day care has been my calling at this time of my life,” Stewart said. “I don’t think that means it has to be my calling until I hit the grave. Now it’s time to move on to something different.”