Louise Thompson: Time to begin again

Here’s an interesting wee fact: 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 powerful about that approaching new decade that 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 so much during 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 patootie to refocus and get serious about what we want to achieve in the next 10 years, 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 this 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.

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 the day of the week starts with an M. That no matter what is past, we get to say how our story will end.

You can write yourself a new ending, starting today.

Life coach Louise Thompson helps people unlock their happiest and healthiest life. Find more at louisethompson.com