Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
I don’t remember the context. But recently I casually asked my Lyft driver, “Do you work out?”
When she admitted she needs to do more, I gave her my usual lecture on the benefits of fitness. You feel better. Your back stops hurting. You get to tell your doctor where to get off. And so on.
I have a feelilng I didn’t make a difference. Not at all. She has a teenage S son who has no interest in athletics; he’s into music production. She’s probably somewhere in her forties.
It was a version of “What would you tell your younger self?”
The answer is, “Nothing.”
The world was different when my current self was younger. When I was in my twenties, women rarely entered the weight room, even if they were on sports teams. We didn’t have studios with yoga, Pilates, and barre classes.
We didn’t have the employment options that are available now. As a woman some doors were just closed to me.
We didn’t have Facebook, let alone a Community of Single People with 8000+ members. I always knew I wanted to be single with cats; back then that was considered very weird. Today, nobody in that Facebook group thinks it’s weird. We describe ourselves by the title of a recent book, Single at Heart.
Bella DePaulo, wrote that book and organized our Facebook group, tells peope she was happily single for the past 70 years. That would have been inconceivable when I was growing up.rtgf
I could tell my younger self to hold different attitudes. I wouldn’t have listened. My younger self was a lot more stubborn. OK, maybe a little more stubborn.
What works is an exercise I got from a life coach I knew more than 10 years ago. She encouraged her clients to envision a future self.
“Think of where you’d like to be in 1, 3, 5 or 10 years. Where are you living? What are you doing? How did you get here? What mistakes did you make? What good things did you do?”
I was surprised. Your future self really comes from your intution. You know what you’d like to be doing. You know what you have to do to get there. You just have to ask, “Is it worth it?”
Of course some things can’t be predicted. Thirty or forty years ago, nobody was predicting that retail shopping would be replaced by Amazon, for many of us. We couldn’t have predicted building a business from a computer. But we could have predicted a lot in the nearer future.
Forget about giving advice to “your younger self.” Don’t waste your time (like I probably did) giving advice to younger people, unless you’re asked, and maybe not even then. Forget about moping over your “regrets.”
What does your future hold? What will your life look like in 2, 3, 5, or 10 years–whatever time frame makes the most sense for you.
