Have You Outgrown Your Life?: Revisited

This isn’t the first time I've unpacked outgrowing one’s life. https://www.hertelier.com/post/have-you-outgrown-your-life. But life has a way of circling back, asking us to look again, feel deeper, and expand further. As I’ve grown, my understanding of this experience has grown too…so I’ve revisited the topic with the hope that it resonates wherever you are on your path.

7 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Life (and What to Do About It)

1. Your routine feels more numbing than nurturing: What once brought comfort now feels like a cage. You're not just bored…you’re hungry for something more alive. 

Consider this shift: Introduce one small change to your routine each week. Take a different route, read outside your usual genre, or try something new just for curiosity’s sake. Let unfamiliarity be a spark, not a threat.

2. Your career no longer reflects your curiosity: You’ve stopped growing…not from lack of effort, but because your deeper questions have changed.

Notice what pulls you now: Make a “Curiosity List.” Follow one thread…through a conversation, a course, or a creative project, and let it breathe.

3. You’re surrounded, but lonely: Friendships that once fit now feel tight or tired. You’re craving connection that reflects who you’re becoming.

Create space for who you're becoming. Host a small gathering around something that lights you up…and let your emerging-self extend the invitation. 

4. You crave beauty, meaning and surprise: That dull ache isn’t a midlife crisis…it’s your soul whispering, “Wake up.”

Make room for wonder: Create an hour each week…no agenda, just art, music, nature, or anything that stirs your soul. Let “wonder” become a practice.

5. You start shedding without knowing what comes next: You’re letting go instinctively: jobs, habits, even identities…and it’s disorienting.

Honor what you’re releasing. Write a list of what you’re releasing…name what you’re outgrowing and what it gave you. Then mark the moment with a simple ritual: burn it, bury it, bless it.

6. The spaces you inhabit feel too small. You’re ready to stretch, even if you don’t yet know the dimensions.

Stretch gently: Redesign one corner of your life: a room, a boundary, a morning. Let it reflect who you are now.

7. Your definition of success is evolving: What once mattered now feels like someone else’s dream.

Let success redefine itself. Write one sentence, in the present tense. Place it somewhere visible. Let it guide your choices.

Honoring the In-Between

Growing pains are real, but so is the promise on the other side. Author Jen Ryan reminds us, “Growth can be scary and requires you to stretch into the unfamiliar… It demands that you take risks by leaving the known and comfortable behind.” Or, as Anaïs Nin so soulfully wrote:“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”That day may be now. So, you feel like you’re in between––no longer quite who you were, and not yet who you're becoming––take heart. You haven’t lost your way. You’re being reshaped.

Outgrowing your life doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you're still becoming. 

And that’s something to honor, not hide.