Transitioning Into Your 30's: What Misplaced Expectations & Missed Milestones Can Teach You
Have you ever read a book that is divided into parts?
Part 1, part 2, part 3; each with its own beginning, middle and end, but covering multiple storylines from multiple perspectives. Each part builds a part of the story, leading to the next challenge for the main character to face.
The author does this on purpose because otherwise the story would be too long. The story isn’t always linear; sometimes it can swing wildly in another direction. The end of a story doesn’t have to be what’s expected. And it’s better if it’s a surprise.
I often wish we had the same outlook on our own lives.
There is often an expectation downloaded into us by society and/or our families. We expect to see life unfold in a particular way, and when that does not happen on time (or at all), it can leave us wondering: what went wrong?
The short answer is nothing.
Your life is a winding story with many parts, not a linear narrative.
This narrative about the order in which we experience life is not the current reality for a lot of people.
We often think about our lives from the framework of achievements to accomplish by a particular time - graduate, build a career, find a partner, buy a house, have kids (if that's the dream).
Then, we hit a peak in our mid-life and begin doing everything in reverse - launch the kids into their careers, downsize the house, retire.
Have you ever considered life from a different angle? Or had to consider it, because the choice was taken out of your hands?
Milestones are a challenging way to measure success because we all follow a different path.
I saw a social media post recently where a 37-year-old woman was asking the community if it was too late to go back to school.
The comments were filled with stories, like mine, where people were late in life going back to school, switching careers, building a business, having children. The writer was encouraged: it's never too late.
And, for someone in their 50’s, 37 feels very young.
I began my studies to become a therapist at 38, graduating at 45. I quickly started my own practice. I was able to 'retire' from my 9-5 job at 50.
That was the original goal. It just took a little longer than I thought it would.
Milestones can be missed for various reasons.
My journey took longer as I took side-excursions along the way. I was a single mom through most of my life, getting married at 33 and having another baby at 36.
I did a first degree in Adult Education before doing a second in Counselling Therapy.
As a family, we needed more time than anticipated to raise our boys, battle financial challenges, and buy a house with space for my mom and step-dad.
There was job loss and new jobs that required time and attention.
None of it looked like the chapter book template I was made to believe my life would resemble. There were many periods of time when I needed to pause for healing work and figure out my bearings.
The milestones we were given should have provided stable checkpoints that I could reliably achieve on my life’s journey. But we all know that this is very rarely the case these days.
The good news is: there is no timeline. You’re writing your own chapters as you make your way through life.
In my work, it is easy to see the chapters of someone else’s story when we graph it out. This was an activity I included in my book, Thriving in Chaos.
Part I: The Building Years
I'm a global learner, so I like to see everything laid out before me. It's easier to see patterns and themes that way.
Typically, everyone has three major parts to their stories with chapters within those parts fleshing out the particular, unique story of their lives.
Inevitably, there are years in early adulthood where we are building who we are as adults (see June's blog on Transitioning to Adulthood). I call these ‘the building years'. They’re the prologue and early chapters of the story that tell us who we are and what we value.
Everyone’s story is unique. Can you imagine reading biographies of people who hit all the milestones like a set of check boxes? How boring.
We read stories filled with adversity and overcoming. It is the Hero's Journey, or as one of my friends called it, The Romantic Battle.
The building years are about building the outline of our story. Shaping who we become.
If we are subscribing to a set of external expectations that do not fit the direction our story wants to take, it will feel like wearing a jacket that is the wrong size. There is nothing wrong with the jacket; we have simply outgrown it.
Part II: Hitting Our Stride
Part II: Hitting Our Stride is the part of the story where things begin to come together, and it often does happen in our 30s.
For some of my clients, that is hitting an age where parenthood is becoming less likely biologically.
It could be stagnation in a beloved career or a loss of passion for things that once filled us with joy.
We could be contending with the difficulty we experienced getting to where we are. Feel tired at the prospect of how much further we have to go to achieve our goals.
It can mean openly grieving milestones that we didn’t hit, that feel less likely once we’ve gotten close enough to see our mid-life ahead of us.
That grief can come from within ourselves, but it can also come from our family as they also come to terms with the settling that comes with our 30’s. We contend with the feelings of unworthiness that can follow missed milestones. The misplaced feelings of our loved ones.
We wonder what our life might have looked like if we had just chosen differently.
But settling into your values and coming into alignment with who you are as a person gives you new perspectives, too.
With the grief that comes with transitioning into our 30’s also comes the ability to reconsider our priorities. To challenge the status quo and start to feel happy and secure with who we are in the world.
Beside the grief for missed milestones, there is resilience. We know how to pick ourselves up and start to build again. We have done many challenging things and failed many times, and have learned that the hurts don’t last long.
As I talked about in this post about Developing a Growth Mindset, we have learned how to overcome challenges and find growth.
Struggle → Reflection → Growth
Our 30’s are a period of reflection. We can go back and comb over previous chapters and learn valuable lessons. We can see who we were and who we are becoming and make choices to change the direction our final chapters are going to go.
There may be grief during this life review because the outcome we have from our choices is not exactly what we expected.
It could look like regret, not necessarily from the decision we made, but because we did not listen to our own voice in making those decisions along the way.
One exercise I love to do with clients who are transitioning into their 30s is around Macro Planning.
Crafting a Macro Plan for your 30’s
There are many times throughout our lives when we may find ourselves asking big, existential questions. Having a few things mapped out makes it easier to keep the story on the right course.
Crafting a Personal Mission
Just as an author may plan out a character, I like to make a plan for myself. The first step is to have a personal mission to guide my way forward.
Step 1: Values excavation
Pick one value that comes to mind first when you think about what matters to you. Write it down.
Ask yourself why that value matters. Write down whatever answer comes up, even if it feels obvious.
Take that answer and ask why again.
Keep going until the answers stop changing, usually three or four rounds in. The value you land on at the end is closer to the root than the one you started with.
Step 2: Split it into two questions
Look at the root value you landed on. Answer these separately:
Who does this value say I'm trying to become?
What does this value say I'm here to do?
Write a sentence for each. They don't need to sound polished.
Step 3: Draft the mission statement
Combine the two sentences from Step 2 into one statement using this structure: "I am becoming someone who [who you're becoming], so that I can [purpose]."
Read it out loud. Cross out any word that sounds like something you think you should say rather than something you mean. Write it down and keep it close so you can see it every day.
Part III: The Art of Becoming
The Art of Becoming is a theme that moves with us through life as we gather experiences and make decisions.
Our 30's can be the first time we are high enough up on the life ladder to survey the landscape. It could be that we can clearly see that someone else picked the ladder, how fast we'd climb, and the wall it's leaning against.
This may be the first time we feel disappointed with where it's all gotten us.
It's important to grieve that. Especially if all the hard work did not yield the results we were looking for. For people in their 30's now (looking at you Millennials), your cultural landscape is very different than any generation before you.
There is an element of figuring things out as you go because you are in uncharted territory given the current social circumstances.
We are not capable of fixing everything; however, we can decide what is important to us and focus our attention there. We can reset our intentions and strive to create a life that feels comfortable enough to live in. We can write our own chapters without listening to the advice of others, if it doesn’t fit right.
Focusing on a macro-plan (where the story is going) AND building resilience are the bookends to our day-to-day thriving. We need to know where we're going, and we need the skills to adjust as life unfolds.
In my next post, we’ll be talking about transitioning into one of my favourite seasons, our 40’s, where the Art of Becoming really comes into play.