Feeling Stuck or Lost? Find Your Way Forward With a Questions Map

But first let's talk about the Lion King.

“Okay, let me explain this by telling you about a very old movie,” Nick Kabrél said¹. Kabrél is a doctoral researcher in psychology at University of Zurich in Switzerland in his early twenties, and I was talking to him on video chat about his research, which I believed revealed fascinating insights about how we could better navigate uncertain experiences. “The movie is called The Lion King—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.”

“I’ve heard of it.” I tried not to laugh, my amusement mixed with a touch of horror. It was the same thing I felt when I noted that Friends was now playing on Nick at Nite—­in the same time slot that once played reruns of shows like I Dream of Jeannie when I was a little girl. I was getting old.

Kabrél reminded me of one of the first scenes in the movie, when young cub Simba and his father, the king, gaze over the savanna.

“Look, Simba—­everything the light touches is our kingdom,” Simba’s father says.

“Wow,” Simba says. And then, “What about that shadowy place?”

“That’s beyond our borders—­you must never go there, Simba,” the king says.

As a young cub, Simba obeys his father and avoids the shadowy place. After the death of his father, Simba sings “Hakuna Matata,”—­which translates to no worries—avoiding the darkness while his enemy, Scar, occupies the kingdom and terrorizes its citizens. But as Simba grows up, “he realizes that in order to manage his inner map, he must go to those shadow territories, and manage the chaos there,” Kabrél explained. “This is a metaphor of what we need to do with our questions. Uncertainty represents these shadow territories that aren’t yet incorporated into your kingdom, so you need to be brave, embrace this position of a hero, and start asking questions that will bring light to those dark places. Our enemies—­uncertainty, maladaptive emotions, bad habits—­become parasites in our minds unless we decide to deal with them.”

Kabrél is somewhat of an expert on the subject. He studies the mechanisms in our brain that allow us to uncover intellectual and therapeutic insights. His first published research project started with an observation he made about his own experience in therapy: He often used spatial metaphors when he talked about his internal introspective processes, referring to places where he didn’t want to go, dark parts of his psyche (what Carl Jung called our shadow parts), areas unexplored and unmapped, the experience of going in circles.

He wondered: Why did his experience of traveling inward often feel like physical exploration? Why did spatial metaphors come so naturally? Was it the same for other people, and if so, what did that mean?

As he began to learn more, he discovered the neuroscientific concept of mental navigation. It’s based on neurological research showing that we use the same brain regions to navigate both mental space—­in other words, the relationships between ideas, memories, and thoughts—­and physical space. This idea, Kabrél points out, has early roots in philosophy, science, and art; he even cites the idea commonly attributed to the poet Rilke that “the only journey is the one within.”

Now that he knew there was a neuroscientific foundation for his query, he still wanted to understand the role that spatial metaphors might play in the self-­discovery process. He and a team of researchers compared how much people used spatial language across three contexts—­therapeutic conversations, publicly available conversations from podcast recordings, and movie dialogue—­looking at approximately thirty-­eight million words in total. They also examined 110 psychotherapeutic conversations qualitatively. They found a significant increase in the use of spatial metaphors during therapy sessions as compared to everyday conversations or fictitious conversations, suggesting that the process of mental navigation may be important to the process of therapy and to understanding why and how therapy helps us change.

In other words, their research supports a concept that undergirds not only psychotherapy but many spiritual practices: We can change the way we experience our physical and emotional lives through cognitive exploration. These findings also hint at a way we can start to engage differently with our big questions—­something we can do to help us feel a little less lost in the haze of uncertainty, unsure of where we are and where we’re going.

Exploring Uncertainty

Many of us are currently grappling with extreme uncertainty—personally and professionally. 

This uncertainty often provokes a similar, biologically-mediated impulse in all of us: the desire for answers. Without these answers, we can feel stuck and lost, like we’ve been marooned on a foggy island with no compass, map, or boat. 

In these conditions, it can feel hard (or impossible) to do the kind of cognitive exploring Kabrél suggests is necessary for growth. This is a frustrating position to be in. On the one hand, we know we need to venture into the unknown to discover the new ideas that will help us evolve. But on the other hand—because we don’t currently have the answers we crave—we don’t feel confident enough to leave our comfort zones to explore.

This is the paradox I attempted to tackle after my conversation with Kabrél.

And so, as part of my book How to Fall in Love With Questions, I developed a Questions Map² to help anyone feeling mired in uncertainty chart a path to get unstuck. It’s designed to help you gain clarity even when you don’t have all of the answers, and to help you build a questions practice. 

Below, I’m offering a downloadable version of the map with some instructions on how to use it for paid subscribers.

However, if you’d like a copy of the map and can’t afford a subscription, please shoot me a note and let me know—I’d be glad to provide one to you.

The Key Elements of a Questions Practice