Learning to trust your own compass
There’s a difference between a map and a compass, and most of us spend the first half of our lives learning to read someone else’s map without ever discovering that we carry our own compass.
A map tells you where the roads are and gives you the lay of the land. It tells you where the destinations worth going to are located. It tells you which turns to take at which intersections. Someone else drew the map, based on their own experience of the terrain and their own judgment about which places are worth marking. When you use the map, you are following the choices someone else has already made. The map is useful, and it can get you to places you might not have found on your own, but it can only take you to the destinations the mapmaker chose to include.
A compass is different. A compass tells you which way is north and nothing more. It leaves the destinations to you. When you follow a compass, you have to decide for yourself where you are trying to head. You have to walk the terrain yourself. You have to make judgment calls at every fork in the road that no one else can make for you. The compass is harder to follow than the map. It is also the only instrument that can take you somewhere the mapmaker never went.
Most people spend their whole adult lives following the map. The family map that told you which career was respectable. The religious map that told you which choices were moral. The cultural map that told you what a successful life looks like. The professional map that told you which promotions to chase and which relationships to cultivate. Each of these maps has its own logic and its own destinations, and each of these maps was drawn by someone other than you, for purposes that may or may not have anything to do with your actual life.
At some point in adulthood, if the conditions are right, a person begins to hear their own compass. It usually starts as a whisper. A sense that something is off with the direction you have been walking, even though you can’t yet name what is off. A pull toward something you can’t yet justify. A discomfort with a path that everyone around you thinks you should be taking. The compass speaks in a different language than the maps. It offers direction rather than arguments. And the first time you notice it, you may not even trust that what you are hearing is real.
Robert Kegan describes this shift as the movement from what he calls the socialized mind to the self-authoring mind. The socialized mind takes its direction from the systems around it. It is shaped by what the family thinks, what the church teaches, what the culture rewards, or what the group expects. This is where people spend most of their lives, and there is nothing shameful about it since it’s where every young person begins. The self-authoring mind is a different way of being in the world. It has developed its own framework for making sense of things, and it uses that framework to evaluate the systems around it rather than being evaluated by them. Kegan estimates that only a portion of adults ever make the full transition to self-authoring, and the ones who do usually make it slowly across years or decades of hard internal work.
Looking back, I can see that I made my own first meaningful move toward self-authoring when I took a manufacturing job and left the farm. That was the first time I chose the direction my compass was pointing over the direction of the map that was handed to me. Later, that gave me the courage to walk away from the church I attended for years. Another move towards self-authoring yet again. Finally, choosing to go back to school later in life, obtain a master’s degree, and then eventually leave that manufacturing job after 25 years was another strong indication that I was choosing to follow my own compass.
In every situation, the cost was significant. Relationships changed, while some ended entirely. People I had known for a long time no longer knew what to do with the version of me who was following an internal compass they couldn’t see. For a while I couldn’t fully justify what I was doing, even to myself. I only knew that continuing to follow the map I had been given had begun to feel like I was lying to myself in a way I could no longer live with.
Walking away from those maps did something in me that would matter more later than I understood at the time. It taught my body that following my compass was possible. That the world would not end when I chose an internal signal over an external one. That the people who mattered would find their way back to me, or would not, and that either way I could keep walking in the direction that was true for me. Every act of internal authority builds the capacity for the next act. You learn to trust yourself by trusting yourself, and the trust grows through the specific experiences of choosing your compass and finding out that you were right to trust it.
One of my favorite authors, Erich Fromm, observed that most people are afraid of the freedom that comes with internal authority, and that the fear runs deeper than most of us know. In his book Escape from Freedom, he made the case that the human capacity to choose our own direction is a burden many of us would rather not carry. It’s so much easier to hand our authority to someone else, whether that someone is a religious leader, a political ideology, a boss, a spouse, a therapist, a guru, or a culture. When we hand our authority over, we no longer have to bear the anxiety of choosing for ourselves. We no longer have to face the possibility of being wrong in ways we cannot blame on anyone else. Fromm’s argument is that this escape from freedom is one of the deepest and most dangerous patterns in human behavior, and that resisting the escape requires more courage than most of us have ever been asked to develop.
In 2022, I made a move that only became possible because of everything the earlier compass-following had built in me. I left the manufacturing job I had held for twenty-five years and started Illume Wellness Group. Twenty-five years is a long time to give one company, and I could not have made this move even a few years earlier. What made it possible in 2022 was the accumulated capacity from a lifetime of smaller acts of internal authority. Each earlier compass-following had built the trust that made this larger one possible. My body already knew that the world would not end when I chose an internal direction over an external one, because it had already lived through the smaller versions of that choice several times before.
Illume Wellness Group is a mental health practice my co-owner and I built to be the kind of place I would have wanted to walk into as a young man who did not yet have language for what was happening inside him. It is a group practice now, with a team of thoughtful clinicians who work with people navigating the same kinds of ruptures and transitions this whole series has been describing. We work with people who are leaving systems they used to belong to. We work with people who are grieving lives they were told to want. We work with people who are trying to find their own compass after decades of following someone else’s map. Building Illume has been the most alive I have felt in my working life, and it has been the specific place where the years of internal work have finally taken external form. The clinicians who work with me are extraordinary humans doing sacred work, and being part of what we are building together is one of the great honors of my life.
None of this would have been possible if I had kept following the maps that were handed to me. The manufacturing job that once represented my first act of authority had, over decades, become another map I was following rather than a compass I was reading. The internal work that had begun with leaving the farm, and that had deepened with leaving the church, and that had accelerated with the therapy and the reading and the schooling, was always pointing toward something I could not yet see. The compass had a specific destination in mind, though I could not have named it in advance. Illume is what the compass had been pointing at all along.
If you are trying to build your capacity to trust your own compass, know that it happens slowly and it happens through practice. Each time you choose your own direction and find out that the choice was right, your trust in the compass grows a little. Each time you choose the map instead and feel the specific weight of doing what someone else has told you to do, your awareness of the difference between the two grows a little. Over time, if you keep practicing, the compass becomes more reliable than the map ever was. It takes you places the map could not have shown you. And it produces a life that is unmistakably your own.
The compass does not tell you where to go. It only tells you which way is north for you. Everything else is still yours to walk.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: The Revolutionary Character
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
