Walking across my high school graduation stage in 2007, I felt confident in the plan that I had established for my adult life. According to my plan, I entered my undergraduate Business program, finishing it in three years, to quickly advance forward to my Masters program in the same field. While having odd jobs throughout my post-secondary education, I was laser focused on getting my dream job and rapidly climbing the corporate ladder when I arrived. And I did just that, I had this thing called life all figured out, or so I thought.
Shortly after getting married, I experienced a life altering event - I became a Mom after having experienced a miscarriage all in the same year. I will never fully be able to work out why loss before experiencing the joys of motherhood was on my path but it had given me a new perspective on life. Before I even became consciously aware of it, what I thought I wanted from life was evolving. No longer was it a race to the top for me, I wanted to slow down and experience more - be more present, nurturing the important relationships in my life. While my career and education was still a big part of my identity, it wasn’t everything. I actively passed on roles that didn’t align with the life that I was building.
It’s OK to not have it all figured out
It’s absolutely normal to not know what you want to do with the entirety of your life. Your goal should be to find out and continue to evolve as many times as required. A person’s perspective on the future is often impacted by age, gender, culture and socioeconomic factors, just to name a few. Additionally, who you want to be or what you want to do at a given point in your life, is impacted by the lenses through which you view life and your ability to make future based decisions given the knowledge you have at that time. You may have heard it said throughout your upbringing that ‘with age comes wisdom’. Although not always appropriately used, the science seems to back this theory that having a sense for what you want your future to look like, evolves with increased awareness. It would then be, despite societal expectations, expected that your perspective on what you want from life to change as you experience it.
Holding goals for the future is important because it provides you with purpose for the current stage in life. That said, release yourself from the idea that each step along the path has to be pre-planned in order for you to create a meaningful life.
You probably have more figured out than you think.
Life rarely goes as planned, so for that reason you have learned, via trial and error, what outcomes you want to experience more - use these opportunities as a launching point to figure out even more things about yourself. Maybe you feel unsure about your life’s plan because you are passionate about achieving more than one thing. Why not work toward both? Maybe you decide later down the line to proceed with one thing over the other or you figure out a way to achieve both. Gone are the days of picking a career and staying put until retirement, unless that’s what you want. If, after choosing a path, you wake you one day and want different for yourself, choose it. Pivot your energy to moving in this new life direction.
Find what motivates you and go at a pace that seems natural to you. Don’t let what you see on social media convince you that you are somehow behind - run your own race. There are things that each of us were uniquely placed here to do, it is our job to figure that out.
Citations
McInerney, D. M. (2004, June 2). A discussion of future time perspective - researchgate. Research Gate. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dennis-Mcinerney/publication/311515626_A_Discussion_of_Future_Time_Perspective/links/584a3df108aed5252bcbeb49/A-Discussion-of-Future-Time-Perspective.pdf
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