How to Start Making Career and Life Decisions After Leaving Christianity
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I consider myself a former Christian who is now spiritual not religious. If you’re a former Christian or someone who’s transitioning out of Christianity and you’re anything like me, your identity was probably strongly tied to your religion. This means that when you leave Christianity, you might be confused about where to turn for direction when it comes to big life decisions like what to do as a career, how to form new relationships, and even where to live.
If this is or could be a struggle for you, please know that there are ways to find some clarity about how to move forward without religion. And in this post, I’m going to help you do just that.
(I have to admit that religion actually made it harder for me to move forward because it led me to take a passive approach to life. It was only after I left that I started taking a more active approach.)
General Life Decisions
Before you start making general life decisions, I would strongly advise you to get clear on your core values. Your core values can serve as a compass you now use to guide your decisions. And to help you use your values as the compass they are, I would suggest you write a personal vision statement that highlights your values and why they’re important to you. I go more into how to write one here.
Essentially, your values and personal vision help you answer questions like, “Who am I going to be going forward?” and “What does an authentic/fulfilling life look like to me?”
Once you’re clearer on your values and personal vision, whenever you have to make a general decision for your life, ask yourself these two questions: “Is this aligned with my core values?” and “Does this match my personal vision?” This can help make the best decision for you clearer because you’re considering how aligned the choices are with your idea of who you want to be and what a fulfilling life looks like to you.
One thing you should know, though, is that there might be times when the answer isn’t so clear—when you’re struggling to know whether or not something is aligned with your values or your vision. You might want to have a system in place for those kinds of decisions. Like maybe you can have a guideline for exceptions or unclear cases.
A guideline could be something like, “When the answer isn’t clear, I follow my heart” or “When the answer isn’t clear, I look at the data.” People who prefer to lead with feeling might prefer the first guideline, while people who prefer to lead with logic might prefer the second.
The bottom line is, when you encounter those difficult decisions where it’s not immediately clear to you how value-aligned one choice is over another, you’ll want to have an idea of how you’ll make your choice. Because if you want to live an authentic or fulfilling life, indecision isn’t an option.
Even so, try to make sure you’re only using this guideline for challenging choices. If you don’t feel that your life has been very authentic until now because you’ve been making choices based on religion and religious teachings, you’re going to have to practice making decisions that may feel weird, uncomfortable, or even wrong because they aren’t the decisions you would normally make.
But you’re making these choices because they’re aligned with a more authentic you. The discomfort is just part of the personal growth process. So, don’t use this guideline as a way to get out of facing that (temporary) discomfort. It’s only for the real exceptions.
Addressing Specific Life Decisions: Career
Now we’re going to start getting more specific. To help with career decisions, I’m going to begin by asking you to respond to the following journal prompts. Then, based on common themes in your responses, you can identify your five core values with respect to your career.
What are some of your skills, passions, and strengths?
Which would you like to use to make money?
Would you rather be an employee or an entrepreneur/freelancer of some kind? (Even if you prefer the idea of having your own business in a creative field, you’re still technically an entrepreneur.)
Would you rather go to a physical location or be able to work from anywhere (remotely)? Or would you prefer a hybrid?
How much money would you like to make? (Refer back to your general core values for this one. Think about the lifestyle you would like to live and how much it would cost. But also think about your ability to save and invest for the future. To truly live a fulfilling life, you can’t be stressed about finances.)
How do you feel about having multiple sources of income? (You might want to consider this if you don’t think you can make enough money from one source to support your lifestyle or if you would like to have more to save and invest. And please know that I’m not talking about having two or three jobs. Some of this income could be passive.)
Once you’re clear on your core career values, you’ll be in a better position to look for a career or start a business that’s actually aligned with the kind of work you want to do. If you like, you can even write a mini personal vision statement for your career.
And then, when looking for your dream job or business, remember to run it through the filter of these two questions: “Is this aligned with my core career values?” and “Does this match my personal (career) vision?”
Addressing Specific Life Decisions: Relationships
After leaving Christianity, depending on the circumstances under which you left, you may find it either somewhat or very challenging to start forming new relationships. This can be especially true if there is religious trauma involved or if you were part of a high-control religion. To start forming new healthy relationships, it’s important to have your core values in place for those relationships before you look for them.
Now I’m going to ask you to do the same exercise as above for your relationships. Here are some journal prompts that might be helpful for understanding what kinds of people you want to spend your time with:
How would you like to feel when spending time with other people?
How would you like to feel after you’ve spent time with other people?
How would you like to feel when interacting with others in any way (including texting, online messaging, etc.)?
What are some of the qualities of people you enjoy spending time with?
What are some of the qualities of people you don’t enjoy spending time with?
How would you describe a healthy relationship?
Do you find that most or all your relationships have been healthy until now? If not, what made them unhealthy?
If you had any unhealthy relationships, were there any red flags that you noticed in some or all of them? And if so, were you aware they were red flags at the time or did you only notice them afterward?
Do you find you have any tendencies that might make it harder for you to form or identify healthy relationships?
What role could boundary-setting play to help you keep from entering into unhealthy relationships?
Once you’ve identified your core relationship values by looking for themes in your responses, you can use them as you start to form new relationships going forward. But if you are dealing with religious trauma or recovering from a high-control religion, give yourself time to form these relationships. This will be a very delicate process, so try to be as patient with yourself as you can.
Also, when it comes to relationships, while you can identify general relationship core values for you, you can also establish core values specifically for your family relationships, your friendships, your romantic relationships, and any other relationships you have. (You may even want to include necessary boundaries you need to set for friends and relatives who haven’t yet come to accept your decision to leave Christianity. I go into that more here.)
Additionally, you have the option of writing mini personal vision statements for all relationship categories. But the most important thing is, when forming new relationships, run them through the filter of these two questions: “Is this relationship aligned with my core values?” and “Does this relationship match my personal (relationship) vision?”
Addressing Specific Life Decisions: Where to Live
While some people may choose where they want to live by default or convenience, this is a decision you can make for yourself based on where you actually want to live and where you think you would thrive. It might be true that family or other obligations make it hard to just pick up and move to wherever you want. But if you have the freedom to choose where you want to live and it’s not where you’re currently living, you might want to consider making a change.
Now I’m going to ask you to do the same exercise for where you want to live. The following journal prompts can help with this:
Do you prefer the hustle and bustle of a big city or would you rather live in a small town? Or would you prefer somewhere suburban or rural?
Would you rather live in a more traditional dwelling like a house or an apartment? Or would you rather something less traditional, like a tiny house or a boat? How about a cottage or a castle?
How walkable do you want your place to be? And how simple would you like it to be to use public transportation?
Do you want to be constantly moving from one place to the next? Or would you rather be relatively stable?
Do you want to have easy access to nature? How about water?
What else would you like your place to be close to? (For example, museums, coffee shops, libraries, bookstores, shopping, mountains, hiking trails, outdoor activities, etc.)
How important is it to you to be close to family and friends?
Do you want a place with a vibrant night life? Or would you rather things be on the calmer side?
What type of climate do you prefer?
Do you want to live somewhere with a lot of history? Or would you rather be surrounded by newer vibes?
Would you like to speak the language of the place where you live? Or are you willing to learn a new language?
Is there a specific type of cuisine you would like to have access to? If so, which?
How important is it to you that you live close to your work?
If living close to your work is important, how close is close?
After you’ve responded to these journal prompts, you can look for common themes and start identifying your core values for where you would like to live. Then you can consider writing another mini personal vision statement, this one location-based. And when it comes to choosing where you want to live, run the place through these filters: “Is this place aligned with my core location values?” and “Does this location match my vision for an ideal place to live?”
Addressing Other Life Decisions
You can do something similar to this exercise with all aspects of your life. Just ask yourself some questions about your preferences and then determine your core values based on common themes. This will help make it easier to make decisions about those areas when you need to.
And as I said in the relationship section, you might find that with other areas of your life you can either be more general or more specific. Just do what feels right to you.
You might want to start off more general, but then you get more specific in certain areas as your values become clearer. Or you might just add or swap a value or two for specific areas. If you want to have more than five core values in any area, that’s completely fine. I just think five is a good number to start with. But feel free to add more or use fewer as you see fit.
Final Thoughts
If you’re used to relying on religion for guidance about how to live your life, after leaving Christianity, you’re going to need a new way to figure out how to make decisions. I hope the advice in this post helps you understand how you can start reclaiming your power and moving forward based on your values and what an authentic or fulfilling life looks like to you now.
~ Ashley C.
P.S. If you’re a Christian who would like help transitioning from Christianity to a version of spirituality that’s aligned with your values and isn’t weighed down by religious dogma, I offer spiritual coaching services you might be interested in. Simply click here to learn more.