The Quiet Shame of Not Knowing What’s Next
On Ambition, Identity, and Learning To Stay Still When the Next Right Step Is Unclear
By Denise Lee Yohn
We're grateful to share this reflection from Denise Lee Yohn, reposted here with her permission. Denise is a brand leadership expert, bestselling author, keynote speaker, and co-founder of the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech. A former vice president and general manager of Brand & Strategy at Sony, she has advised organizations including Frito-Lay and Oakley and contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review and Forbes. Learn more from Denise at her Substack Called to be…
Dear fellow traveler,
I have to tell you something, and I’m not sure I want to. But, here goes:
I don’t know what’s next for me.
There. I said it. And if you could feel the small wave of shame that passed through me as I typed those words, you understand why this letter is hard to write.
A few months ago, I transitioned out of day-to-day leadership of the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech (FWT)—the organization I co-founded. This was intentional. We had set the wheels in motion last year when we hired an Executive Director. I had planned for this moment from the very beginning.
I remain an advisor, content provider, fund raiser, and cheerleader for the organization, but I no longer participate in team meetings, plans are made without me, the work requires far less time and attention from me. It has felt good to release the operational burden and to have more spaciousness in my schedule.
And yet.
Permission for image by Called to be…
When What’s Next Isn’t Clear
When people ask me about my “next,” I stumble.
I’m still speaking and writing for corporate leaders, though that’s a smaller part of my work now. I serve on another nonprofit board, I’m involved in planning a global conference, and I write these letters to you.
So, I’m not without work. My calendar isn’t empty.
What I’m uncertain about isn’t my activity level—it’s my identity and direction. When you’ve spent years being “the founder” or “the brand expert” or “the keynote speaker,” and then those roles shift or shrink, the question that surfaces is more than what should I do? It’s who am I now? And that’s a harder question to sit with.
I recognize that even having space to ask these questions is a kind of privilege. For many people, a spacious schedule is a luxury—for others, it’s a financial impossibility. I hold that tension. This reflection comes from my particular situation, not a prescription for everyone.
But for those of us who do have some agency over our time and yet still find ourselves filling every gap with productivity, afraid to sit in uncertainty, I think there’s something here worth examining.
I’ve Been Here Before
In my early 30s, I left what I thought was my dream job. I had climbed the proverbial ladder and secured the role I felt I had been made for—heading up Brand & Strategy for Sony, one of the world’s greatest brands at the time.
But after a lot of leadership turnover, I determined I needed to leave. So, I set out to start my own consulting business without really knowing what I was doing or even what I wanted to accomplish.
When people asked how I planned to grow the business or how much money I wanted to make, I didn’t have answers that satisfied them—or me. I felt unsure of myself in a way that actually made my skin crawl.
And then again, I found myself in a similar place about five years ago, when my corporate work had plateaued.
I had written two business books with no desire for a third. I had stopped consulting because I no longer had the patience for the long and messy engagements that were required for the kind of transformation clients wanted to hire me for. I had built a decent keynote speaking business but didn’t want to do what it would take to reach that “million dollar speaker” level—and honestly, I wasn’t sure I could, even if I wanted to.
What will you do next?, people would ask. What’s your plan?
I thought I might lean into the faith and work ministry space, but I wasn’t sure that would qualify as a “valid” career direction. I felt strange telling people I no longer had big corporate aspirations—and still do, to some extent, even after successfully launching FWT.
A Recurring Theme
And, here I am again. In the in-between.
Do you see the pattern? I finally do.
Whenever I’m not sure what’s next, whenever I choose a path with an uncertain destination, whenever I don’t have clear goals to articulate—I question myself. I feel shame creep in.
I’ve been trying to discern where that shame comes from. Some of it is cultural—the American gospel of productivity that measures human value in outputs and achievements. Some of it is professional, the result of decades in corporate environments where your worth is literally reviewed and rated annually. And some of it comes from certain strands of Christian teaching that emphasize stewardship and fruitfulness in ways that can make rest feel like laziness and uncertainty feel like a lack of faith.
But, in full transparency, some of it is closer to home.
When I left Sony, my dad was incredulous. Why would I leave a secure, high-profile corporate job to become what he expected—a fledgling consultant? I’m pretty sure to this day he doesn’t fully understand why I made that decision—or how it turned out to be a great one on all counts.
But back then, his confusion landed on me as disapproval. And even now, decades later, I notice how much I still want my choices to make sense to the people around me. How much I want to be able to explain myself in terms they’ll respect.
The messages layer on top of each other until they become the water I swim in: Be productive. Be useful. Have a plan. Know your purpose. Don’t waste your gifts.
And underneath all of that is a belief I don’t want to admit: my sense of self-worth is tied to my work. I feel valuable when I’m doing something valuable. But when I’m uncertain about what I should be doing, I don’t feel worthy.
When Ambition Becomes Corrupted
I’ve heard from others who have found themselves similarly challenged.
Some have chosen to leave their jobs to stay home with their children and are grappling with the fear that they’ve put their career aspirations—perhaps their entire future—on hold. Others are navigating the transition into retirement with trepidation, trying to figure out who they are when they no longer have a job, income, or clear sense of purpose. Still others have found themselves without the new job, school opportunity, or important project they had been vying for—and they feel as if they haven’t just failed but actually lost a part of themselves.
It’s natural to feel disappointed and disoriented in circumstances like these—but if we dig deeper, we might see how these feelings reflect an ambition that has become corrupted. Now, I want to be careful here, because, as I shared in my last post on this topic, ambition itself isn’t the problem.
For those achievers among us, chasing big goals serves us well, doesn’t it? The drive to achieve helps us build meaningful careers, accomplish goals, produce important results. Ambition, rightly directed, can be a gift—helping us steward our abilities and create things that have served others.
Plus, Scripture encourages ambition. Heroes of our faith—Daniel, Joseph, David—model it. God wants it—if it’s directed by Him. And, that’s where I struggle—and maybe you do too.
Ambition becomes a bad thing when it’s motivated by a need to prove my worth rather than express it. When the goal isn’t growth or service or creativity, but validation is. When I’m working for my identity instead of from it.
For those of us who are ambitious, driven, and goal-oriented, it’s easy to slip into believing we need to earn our significance through doing. It’s particularly tempting for Christians to get caught up in doing things for God instead of simply being with Him—which is what He wants most. We succumb to what my friend Missy Magnussen Wallace calls “impact idolatry”—the right desire to make a difference that becomes wrongly ordered.
But thank God, the gospel speaks directly to this: we don’t need to do anything—certainly not to prove we are worthy. Because of what Christ has done on the Cross, our significance is secure. Our identity is settled. We have nothing left to prove—not to others, not to ourselves.
Our value is not in what we do for God. It’s in what He has already done for us.
Hallelujah!!
And yet, knowing this and living from it are not the same thing, right?!
We can affirm this truth theologically and still feel the shame rise when someone asks what we’re working on and we don’t have a crisp answer. We can believe our identity is secure and still catch ourselves scanning for the next achievement to anchor our sense of self.
The gap between what we know and how we feel is real—and I’m trying to be patient with myself in that gap rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Learning to Stay Still
So, I’m learning to accept this season. To sit in the discomfort of not knowing. To resist the urge to fill every open hour with productivity. To let the silence be an invitation instead of a verdict. To meet others’ questions about what I’m going to do next with my own wonder and curiosity.
If you’re in a similar place—this in-between, future-unknown, self-doubt kind of space—I hope something here has been useful. Not because I’ve figured it out, but because you’re not alone in the not-knowing.
For me, the seasons when goals were genuinely good were the ones where I was building toward something that I could see mattered to God and others—not just chasing a metric to quiet my insecurity. And the seasons when ambition hurt were the ones where I couldn’t distinguish between the two.
I’m learning, right alongside you, that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is stay still and trust that something is at work even when we can’t see the path ahead.
Even when we don’t know what’s next.
Especially then.