Planning your life is not easy. You have to make decisions, and you have to try to make the right decision at the right time for you. The difficult part is that what feels right today may not always turn out to be the right decision tomorrow. Sometimes you move in a different direction, sometimes life changes around you, and sometimes you simply are not in the right place to make decisions easily.

You might be dealing with your mental health, burnout, cognitive overload or simply everything that life is throwing at you at the same time. When you are neurodiverse, I think there is another layer to all of this. You have to think about your own wellbeing, your strengths, your difficulties, your differences and how much capacity you actually have at that moment.

We make decisions every day. What needs doing? What can wait? Where should I focus? What is important? What happens next? These may sound like simple questions, but when your brain is already overloaded, even everyday decisions can become difficult.

Finding ways to plan, organise yourself and reduce cognitive load can be massively beneficial. But some decisions go far beyond organising a to do list. Changing your job, starting something new, beginning or ending a relationship, buying a house, buying a car, starting a business or completely changing direction are all massive decisions. Finances, family, wellbeing and the expectations we put on ourselves can weigh very heavily on them.

When I look back at my own life, one thing I have realised is that many of the biggest changes were not necessarily part of some amazing master plan. Quite often, life simply moved me forward.

My first role as a youth worker felt natural because I was already doing youth work as a volunteer. It fitted into my life and becoming employed in that area felt like the next logical step. Then I was made redundant and needed a job, so I moved into retail. I worked in different stores, built up my experience and eventually became a supervisor. It was progression, but I also knew that retail was probably not where I wanted my life to stay.

Then came one of the biggest changes. I had the opportunity to work for an organisation I had spent much of my life supporting, the British Dyslexia Association. Going for that job felt completely different. Even the interview felt as though it had been designed for me because I understood the role, I understood why it mattered and I knew I could do it. That was massively empowering.

The following five and a half years created one of the biggest changes in my life. I moved away from a retail career where I could not really see much of a future into something that gave me purpose, stability and opportunity. I suddenly had a proper salary coming in every month. I could buy a car and eventually I could buy a house. My life had moved forward in a way I had not necessarily planned.

Then, after five and a half years, I was made redundant again. I applied for 17 jobs and did not get one interview, so working for myself became the next decision. At that point in my life, it was the right thing to do.

Ten years later, life changed again. Businesses were lost. Companies went through liquidation. Financial pressures became very real. My family experienced the loss of our child. My wife has lived with chronic illness, and I have had to deal with my own mental health and burnout. Through much of that time I kept running, kept working and kept trying to make things happen because one of the strongest beliefs throughout my life has always been supporting people.

But eventually you have to understand that moving forward does not always mean moving faster.

Over the past year I have had the opportunity to work with an amazing team at Toucan Education. I have been able to support the development of Toucan Education, Toucan Workplace and Liberty School, an independent progressive primary school that I genuinely believe can make a difference. That work has reminded me what I enjoy doing. I enjoy creating, developing, thinking, supporting people and sharing ideas.

Now I am looking at the next decision in my life. I work part time. I need to build some additional income, but I also want more living in my life. That balance is important to me now in a way that perhaps it was not before.

So I have been asking myself what I can do with the knowledge, experience and understanding that I already have. I can coach. I can consult. I can share knowledge. I can help people understand things differently. But this time I want to do it at my pace rather than trying to do everything at 100 miles an hour.

I want to take my time. I use the technology that I know. I use assistive technology that I understand, and I use artificial intelligence to support what I want to achieve. I take time to learn, I take time to plan and I take time to write.

I have also rediscovered how much I enjoy writing. I enjoy putting thoughts like this down, exploring what they mean and understanding where they might take me next. Maybe that is part of understanding yourself as well.

When you understand yourself, the decisions do not suddenly become easy. You can still make the wrong decision. You can still change direction. Things can still happen that you could never have planned for. But you can start making those decisions with a better understanding of who you are, what you need and what you want your life to look like.

There are still challenges. There are still people who challenge me and there are still people who probably do not believe that some of the decisions I have made were the right ones. There are still financial worries and consequences from decisions made in the past, and those things do not disappear overnight.

But today I can move forward. Today there is a plan and, perhaps most importantly, I understand myself a little better than I did before.

Sometimes the next step does not have to be the biggest step. It just has to be the right next step for you.