I’m in a season of starting over.
I’ve moved cities. I’m living by myself for the first time. I’m changing jobs. I’m reevaluating how I spend my time and who I spend my time with. And that is just to name a few things going on.
I also call the season of starting over as a season of re-inventment.
I’ve started over before, but it has been different each time.
It made me think about the essence of starting over. There are 2 sides to it.
It can be a positive change that is exciting and makes you feel hopeful.
Or you could take a different view and ask “how did I get to the point that I felt I needed to start over?”
I wouldn’t call this a negative view; I would call this a reflective view.
Starting over can be good in so many ways and sometimes it is very needed.
But what makes us get to the point of feeling we need to re-invent?
I’ve noticed we feel the need to start over when we become someone we no longer want to be.
And that’s ok.
I’m a big advocate for changing your mind over and over again and it takes courage to decide that the old version of you is not who you want to be.
But how do we make sure that there are more days of being proud of the person we are today than days of feeling the need to start over?
I think there are 3 things that can help us with this.
Surrounding yourself with the right people
The times I have found myself off course is when I’m not surrounding myself with the right people.
No matter how hard you fight it, you’re a combination of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Are the people I’m spending time with inspiring me to be the person I want to be?
Am I inspiring them to be someone they want to be?
Just asking these questions, even about the people you have been around for years, I have found can be very eye-opening sometimes.
Following your intuition
There have been times where I’ve mistaken intuition for anxiety.
It was like my intuition or gut was telling me to do something and I didn’t want to listen to it, so it gave me anxiety.
Listening to your gut can be really hard and can feel not always logical. But as soon as I started listening to it, it was like a weight was lifted that I didn’t know was there.
Just making that 1 decision to listen to my intuition has led me to making a lot of other decisions that align to the person I want to be.
Not losing sight of what you find important
It has become more apparent to me recently that we don’t all have the same goals or priorities. And that is ok.
We are all going down our own paths that are perfectly crafted for us. But it is easy to forget that someone else’s path is not always your path.
The times I’ve gotten off track is when I forgot where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and why I wanted to do it.
It might honestly be easier to get off track these days than stay on track.
It takes checking in with ourselves and sometimes getting really quiet to know what is important to us.
Once we know what that is, we can’t lose sight of it.
I think the key in all of this is to take both a positive and reflective view. We can have hope for the future while also learning from the past.
