How to Find Your Purpose Even When You Feel Completely Lost with Cara Cunniff
By Miri Lenoff
·June 13, 2026
There is a specific kind of lost that does not look like crisis from the outside. Your life is objectively fine. You have things to be grateful for. But a quiet voice keeps asking: is this it? Is this really what I am supposed to be doing?
Cara Cunniff specializes in working with people in exactly this place, particularly those navigating midlife transitions, career crossroads, or the unsettling feeling that they have been living someone else's definition of a good life.
The Midlife Awakening
Cara reframes what many people experience as a midlife crisis into something more accurate: a midlife awakening. The crisis framing suggests something has gone wrong. The awakening framing recognizes that something has gone right. Your inner self has gotten loud enough to be heard.
At some point in adulthood, many people realize they have been building a life based on expectations, on what they were told would make them happy, on the path of least resistance. The awakening is the moment those borrowed blueprints stop working.
It is uncomfortable. It is also an invitation.
Purpose Is a Direction, Not a Destination
One of the most common mistakes Cara sees is people treating purpose like a single answer they need to find, as if it is buried somewhere and the job is to locate it.
Purpose does not work that way. It is not a fixed point. It is a direction that emerges from paying honest attention to what energizes you, what you cannot help doing, what kinds of problems you find yourself naturally drawn to solve.
The question is not what is my purpose. The better question is what am I moving toward when I feel most alive?
Getting Curious Instead of Anxious
Not knowing your next step tends to generate anxiety. Cara encourages replacing that anxiety with curiosity. These are different orientations toward the same uncertainty.
Anxiety treats the unknown as a threat. Curiosity treats it as information waiting to be gathered. The same situation, approached differently, produces different results.
This shift is not about pretending uncertainty is comfortable. It is about choosing a more useful relationship with it. Curiosity allows you to explore. Anxiety makes you freeze.
What to Do When You Feel Stuck
Cara often starts with a simple question: when have you felt most like yourself? Not when were you most successful or most approved of. When did you feel most genuinely you?
The answers to that question are clues. They point toward values, toward strengths, toward the kinds of environments and challenges where you do your best work and feel most alive.
You cannot find your purpose in your head. You find it by following the clues your own experience has already given you.
Watch the full conversation with Cara Cunniff on the Known Success Coaches Spotlight.