Here’s an interesting wee fact for you this morning: I see more clients coming for life coaching to make transformative change at the ages of 29, 39, 49 and 59, than all the other years put together. There is something super powerful about that change in decade of our age which naturally gives us pause. We take stock at this turning of the chapter, a whole new decade, and reflect in a way we don’t seem to as much in the in-between years.
When a whole new decade is bearing down on us we seem far more likely to ask ourselves if our life is all that it “should be” by this stage. Are we hitting the milestones we had always privately set for ourselves at this marker? Life can be thrown into sharp relief by contemporaries around us ticking past the same clock and the same milestones.
A change of decade can be the most incredible kick up the pahootie to refocus and get serious about what we want to achieve in the next decade, harnessing that natural motivation can be all powerful. But I also see it as a time where more regret will also surface as a result of the reflection. Of milestones not met or exceeded, statuses not reached. The trick here is not to get sucked into a whirlpool of regret, but to take any relevant lessons and use them to push forwards once again. To not look sorrowfully at the time that has been “lost” but focus all that is to come. To take it as a clean fresh page and begin again. Start anew. Double down. Make it happen.
The quote attributed to C.S. Lewis says it best: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”.
We have the power to write ourselves a new ending any time we choose. We can do it whenever we take the time to reflect and refocus: not just when the year reads “9”, or a day of the week starts with an M. That no matter what is past, we get to say how our story will end. Starting now. You can write yourself a new ending, starting today.
