The “what if” killers
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people lately about possibility. They bring up topics that start with “what if?” or “I wonder if I could do…” and it’s amazing to see the physical shift in the body language, energy and facial expressions. For those few sentences, they become more animated than they’ve been in weeks.
But often what stops their momentum is that they convince themselves that it’s just too much or an unlikely outcome. They often end their monologue with “but I’ve been doing what I’m doing now for so long,” or “I’ve got so much invested in this current path,” or “but this is the only thing that I know I can make money at”.
All are true statements. True but incomplete.
One path of many
I’ve put in thousands of dollars in to 3 degrees and just turned 40. In a few weeks, I’m leaving teaching to start something new, and I don’t view the education, experience nor hard work of the past 20 years as a waste. In fact, it’s the opposite. Teaching has been so incredibly rewarding that it has provided me with the perspective to let myself try something new.
If I’m fortunate, life will be long. So it’s important to me to recognize that the decisions I make in my 20′s, despite serving me very well at the time, are not currently representative of what I truly want to be doing in life. And here inlies a choice: keep doing what I’m doing because well, “that is what one should do”, or take a lateral step sideways and give something else a shot. Just like my past career, nothing needs to be permanent. It’s not a cage.
Just because you’ve started down one path and want to do something else does not:
- make you a failure
- show weakness
- mean that this is the only thing you can do.
When I work with clients, one the thing that often holds them back is the feeling that their life has been misused up to this point because now they want a change. It’s an important perspective shift to realize that those events in your life have helped provide you with the insight to want to make a change. It’s also important to realize that regretting past decisions is not only useless, but inaccurate. We forget all of the reasons that we make decisions when we look back at them. We usually do the best we can with what we’ve got.
Looking forward to the future with a sense of openness as well as learning to be in uncertainty, let’s you realize that the path your on right now is most likely just one of many. The question then becomes, what do you need to do to take yourself from where you are now to where you would like to be?
