25 - It's OK to Change

TRANSCRIPT

 

It’s New Year’s Eve here on the Lessons From Life podcast, which means this is the absolute last episode of the Lessons From Life podcast. I’m Mary Young. Thanks for joining us. as we move from the old year to the new year, from the end of one month to a new month, I’m thinking about transitions, and I’m thinking about change, and I’m thinking about how many times I’ve reinvented myself in my life. I’m also thinking about how this podcast has been reinvented. When I started this in late August, I was just going to be talking about whatever came to mind, but as I worked on it I found that the episodes where I had the most passion were the episodes where I talked about emotional healing and my personal healing journey. That is why effective tomorrow, January 1, the name is changing to Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing Podcast.

Some people would say “Mary, you should’ve thought of that before you started creating the podcast. Now you’re changing the name four months into it.”  I say that just proves that we can change any time. I started on what I thought was the right road. It was the right road for me at the time. I made the best decision I could at the time, with the information that I had. As I travel down that road in this case, the podcasting road, I realized that I wanted to go a different direction.

And that’s okay.

I think back to when I started college. I went to college in 1978 to become an English teacher and eventually a guidance counselor, and by my second year in college I realized I did not want to be an English teacher. I still wanted to be involved in counseling somehow, but I did not want to be an English teacher and so I dropped that major. I’ve lost track of how many majors I had while I was in college...there were 4 or 5, and the thing is there’s nothing wrong with that. We do not have to pick one path when we are 18 and stay there for the rest of our life. We just don’t have to do that.

We live in a world of possibilities, and we can take advantage of all those possibilities. We do not have to stay in the same town that we grew up in. we do not have to stay in our parents’ house our entire lives. We are not trapped by our present or past. One of the best quotes I ever came across during my healing journey says you may not be able to change your past but you can always change your future.

What’s gone behind us is behind us. Some people never look back. I look back periodically just so I can see how far I’ve come.

You can reinvent yourself.

You can evolve.

You can change.

You can change your hairstyle, you can change your college major, you can change your career choice, your location... most importantly you can change your attitude. This is big stuff you guys, and we don’t realize sometimes how important that freedom to change really is, and what a difference it can make in our lives.

I would encourage everybody to spend time this holiday season just sitting and thinking about who you are, where you are, what you’re doing with your life. Is this really what you want to do? Do you like the person that you are? If you don’t, what would it take for you to become a person that you like?

And this is not just a one-time thing you guys. I had this conversation with myself... I tend to do it every year, but I’m trying to think back. Probably the first one for me was when I had just gotten out of the military, so I was 30-ish and had no job. One of my college friends had just been named woman of the year for her community. I looked at her accomplishment and I looked at my not having a job and I had a choice.

I could sit there and cry, or I could sit there and figure out what being successful meant to me. And I decided that I didn’t care if I was ever named woman of the year. That was not my personal definition of success. My definition of success is the people around me -- how I interact with the people around me, being able to look myself in the mirror and like who I am, being able to sleep peacefully at night, not tormented by anything. And I have spent my life pursuing that definition of success.

It has nothing to do with money, fame, possessions...it has to do with being a better version of me. we all have the opportunity to redefine success so that it’s not tied into money, fame, fortune...stuff that we don’t necessarily have control over. We all have the ability to choose to be better human beings, to compete against ourselves each day to be better than we were the day before.

I still do a double take sometimes when somebody will give me a compliment about some aspect of myself that I have changed over the years. The most current one is “you are so organized,” and I’m going “No, I’m scatterbrained. I’ve been scatterbrained for my entire life. Just ask my mother.” And I hadn’t ever realized that I had become organized over the years, because we are able to change. I look at the me when I was 20, 25 even 30, and compare that to the me when I’m 57/58, and I’m like wow.

You would think they were two different people. I’m looking specifically at my work habits, at some of my behavior patterns, and it is amazing to me the changes that I have made over the years. Or to put it another way the ways that I have reinvented myself over the years.

So I’m thinking about transitions today, and re-inventions and things like that because of changing the podcast name, but it really applies to so much more than just the podcast name. Each one of us has the opportunity at any time to stop and say I don’t like the way this is going, and change it. And I hope, I really hope that you find the time this holiday season to have a conversation with yourself, and make sure that you do like the way things are going, that it is the way you want things to be going. And if it’s not, just like I can change the name of the podcast, you can change the direction that you’re taking.

You can change your thoughts, you can change your attitude, you can change your careers, whatever it is that you need to do to be a better version of you.

 

Thanks for listening and will see you on New Year’s Day for a special New Year’s episode of Like Driving in Fog: an Emotional Healing podcast.