Alexis Senge JohnsonIn 2009, after one short year of marriage to the person I always believed to be my best friend, I learned a very important lesson and one that is best summarized by Max DePree:
“In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”
The day that I opened my eyes I realized it was time to become what I needed to be. I needed to grow a back bone, a voice and the ability to make choices based on what was best for me. You would think that as someone who enjoys taking charge of situations at work that this would all come easily to me. It most definitely didn’t at first but, once I set my mind to it, I quickly became the gal that I needed to be.
I’m convinced that each of us makes this shift several times in our lives as we navigate our path through life. We don’t necessarily always realize that is what is happening, but nonetheless it happens and we move forward. Have you ever stopped to ponder if you are what, or who, you need to be? If you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself down a rabbit hole quickly with a hurricane of thoughts swirling around your brain. If you want to kick it up to a full scale typhoon then start questioning if you’re where you need to be. You might want to call and warn the national weather service first though because you’ll be in for quite a doozy.
Trying to guess if you’ve made all the right decisions in life and lead yourself down the right paths to get to where you are is enough to make you second guess everything that surrounds you and drive you insane simultaneously. With an onslaught of issues surrounding those I love, I’ve found myself doing way more thinking than is safe. The upside is that I can easily tell all of those closest to me that they’ve been in my thoughts recently. The downside is that I’m not any closer to anything I’ve asked myself than I was when I started.
It’s times like these that have me wishing I had a “real” full time job and not a temporary one so that I could once again invest my need to mull over details into obtaining a second graduate degree. I’ve really been wishing I could go back to school for a doctoral degree in the last several years, but I only managed to get through my first graduate degree through tuition reimbursement programs. Up until this point I’ve refused to take out a student loan and the unstable nature of my current job makes the think that I shouldn’t budge on that thought. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue searching for just the right program for me so that once I know where the money is coming from there won’t be any hesitation as to what I’m going to tackle.
I digress, so let’s circle back to my original point before I end up ranting about my cydistic need to continually keep educating myself. How do you ever figure out what you need to be? Do you subscribe to the theory that our fate is predetermined for us or that we write our own story as we go? Either way, one thing is for sure, most decisions we make in life would be so much easier if we knew what our end result was meant to be. However, since we don’t there is only one thing we can do. Use your best judgement to make decisions, stick to your guns and never forget that in order to make those around you happy it means you need to ensure that you’re happy first.
