When I first started writing this piece, I thought the big message was life keeps handing you the lesson you need to learn until you learn it. Then, after the first few paragraphs, I thought it was really about choosing what you love over what you are good at. Later, I thought it was about wholeheartedness and then, towards the end, it seemed like I was writing all about living without regrets. Now, I am done and I have no idea what it’s about other than what has been rolling around in my head about life lately, but here it is anyway:
I’ve had conversations recently with a couple women in the midst of significant transitions in their professional lives because of difficult work environments. One left a position despite the fact that she was good at the actual work. The other is contemplating leaving a position that is rapidly becoming no longer right for her. Both were/are torn over it.
But as we have talked about their experiences and the decisions they either came to or are coming to, a very clear thing came to me: life had been trying really hard to steer them towards these decisions for months and even years. Only now were they willing to admit that to themselves.
I am a firm believer (because I have learned this the hard way over and over again) that life keeps handing you the lesson that you need to learn until you learn it. Typically, it starts with a gentle prodding but if you fail to learn it the first time, life/the universe/the God of your understanding turns the volume up just a bit making the next experience with the lesson a little harder to stomach so that you might learn it the next time. Ignore the lesson again, and it gets even more uncomfortable. Eventually, the situation is so unpalatable, that you HAVE to get it.
As I was talking to my friend who recently left her position, we marveled at how there was lots of evidence piling up that said she should leave much earlier but she couldn’t bring herself to do it because the daily-ness of her job—the actual tasks she had at hand- was satisfying and she was really good at it.
“But here’s the thing,” I told her. “You are good at more things than not. Just because you can be successful at something doesn’t mean you need to stick with it. You have to ask yourself what do you most want to be doing. You’re at a place in your life and career where you can actually make THAT be what you do. You don’t have to do what other people want you to do because they don’t want to be doing it. You can choose.”
So many people are good at more than just one thing and we forget that just because something is more effortless for us that doesn’t mean that’s what our purpose is. You get to choose how to fill your days and what you choose doesn’t have to be a favor to someone else. Because when you do tie what you most want to do with your talents, your purpose becomes your gift to the world.
In current talks with my friend whose considering a career change, one of the things that has come up is how long she’s known that this wasn’t the right work for her any longer. She’s at the point where her regrets might measure more years that her joy was there if she doesn’t act quickly.
You don’t want to get to the point where you quit, start enjoying your new life, and regret not doing it YEARS sooner, I’ve told her. If you know now, don’t punish yourself. How you spend your days shouldn’t be like being forced to eat your vegetables.
For all of us, there are lessons before us, waiting to be learned. There are regrets waiting to be recast. The good news is that the lessons don’t always need to be learned with the most drastic solutions but they need truthful solutions; moments where we look at ourselves and our lives, acknowledge that we are already worthy and always enough, and do right by ourselves, knowing that inherently means we’ll fundamentally do right by others.
