It's Never Too Late | Spirit Connection

It’s never too late to be what you might have been – George Eliot. Think about that. Many of my clients tell me that they hate their job or sometimes even their life. When we go deeper into those emotions, for the most part, it’s because they’re not doing what they wanted to do when they were younger – what they always dreamed of doing.

My grandson, as many people know, works with birds at a very well-known Bird Park in Johannesburg. He is a zookeeper and an amazing one at that! In his current position, he gets to breed the birds that he works with (he also does this privately by the way). This means that he gets to learn their intricate habits, wants and needs, in order for them to be in a happy environment and essentially produce offspring. The first reaction of most people when they hear about what he does for a living, is a sense of admiration and then they say this : “It must be so nice to do what you love every day!” I’m always saddened when I hear that, because it tells me straight off the bat that what they do is not what they enjoy.

Why is that so. The majority of us left school and landed a job without too much thought around what we want to actually do with our lives, and so just kind of fell into what we currently do. A lot of us are fortunate too that eventually we get to realise that we just don’t enjoy our life and we are able to make the choice to change our career.

But being what you want to be, doesn’t only apply to your work and career. It applies too, to your life in general. If you ask a little child what do they want to be when they grow up, you’ll get the standard response – doctor, fireman, teacher, pilot, policeman. Yip, all those positions of authority that we look up to as a child. No-one when asked that question answers that they want to be a happy, well-balanced, healthy adult!

And so it makes it so much easier to strive for a career that resembles something of which we want to be, but in never picturing yourself as a happy adult, just enjoying your life in full, it’s something that we never strive for when we should be. When we’re young, attaining a well-balanced life is so much less stressful and so much more achievable.

But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t still become who you want to be, or even who you might have been. Only now, it takes work. It takes time, dedication, commitment and a whole lot of working through the emotional baggage that we’ve collected along the way. But the good news is that it can be done. And…. It’s never too late.

Now that I’m so much closer to 70 than I’ve ever been, I have the advantage of a long life to look back on. For the most part, there isn’t that much about my life that I would change. But saying that, I’m a happy adult. My life is well-balanced and I absolutely love what I do. However, rewind 50 years – even though I was doing what I wanted to do at that time, it wasn’t anywhere near as fulfilling as what I do today is. I have had a very varied life from a career perspective. I have run out of fingers and toes to count how many jobs I’ve had over the years. Whilst there has been a single thread that runs through each of them, in terms of my strengths and what I did to earn a living, the industries were all very different. As I grew and my life changed – children moving out the house – becoming a grandmother – eventually living alone with no-one to take care of, I have felt myself change as a person. I have put in a lot of work to understand all the decisions and choices that I’ve made along the way. I have put in a lot of work to move through any emotional trauma that may have hung around for just a little too long.

The great news here is that you don’t need to be pushing 70 to realise that you can change what you want to be. People change their careers at least 3 times in a lifetime! That’s something to think about. We also evolve as human beings through the many experiences that we go through. Sometimes those experiences make us bitter and if not checked and rectified, that bitterness becomes a hard outer layer that makes us quite impenetrable. And with each bad experience, those layers get piled on and they become so much more fortified and eventually we find ourselves not even recognising the person that we’ve become.

You don’t want to find yourself in this position. There are so many more resources available for you to help you work through your life as and when problems and challenges arise. Please do take advantage of them. Don’t leave things and ignore them, thinking that they will go away. Believe me they won’t. Believe too that when I say it’s never too late to be what you might have become. It’s about making a conscious decision, taking definitive action and committing to yourself. Committing to yourself to be happy. To do with your life what you always wanted to do. To dream big and chase those dreams to the point that you make them a reality. You’ve got this!!