If you could go back in time, and speak to your younger self, what one piece of advice would you give yourself?

There are questions that people bandy about as ice-breakers, or as questions to help you to get to know more about yourself. One of these questions often plays on my mind. It goes something like this:

 Big Question: If you could go back in time, and speak to your younger self, what one piece of advice would you give yourself?

 That is a big question.

When answering that, I often hear people choose a pivotal moment in their life where they feel they may have made a wrong choice on their path in life, and advise to take the alternate road. I hear things like, you should go to uni, you shouldn’t go to uni, marry that guy, don’t marry that woman and so on. These kinds of advice often hint at regrets people have on actions they did, or did not take, which they feel have adversely affected their lives. Big issues. Good answers.

If you have never asked yourself this question, highly unlikely, but if you never have, ask yourself now, and think on your answer. You too, will probably try and influence a pivotal decision in your life.

My own life has been a complete trail of disasters, many of them caused by my own self, although there were some that could, and should, be blamed on others. That made this question a challenge for me. If I could give myself one single piece of advice, far enough back for it to count, what actually would it be? What is the worst thing I could rectify, if I could give my younger self advice? And how would I narrow it down?

It really began to work my nerves that I couldn’t identify one thing in the bog of never-ending doom, that would steer me into a life better lived. There were just too many wrong decisions, wrong turns, lack of actions, mistakes, failures….

The more I pondered this question, the more I realised that I was so good at fucking things up, that I should have got some sort of award for it, but the net result was, I saw myself as a failure.

That is never a good place to be in your mind. Take it from me - you don’t ever want to start to believe that you are a failure, a fuck-up, useless, thick, worthless, waste-of-space. Yup, once you buy into one of those words, you begin to buy into all of them.

One day though, and I remember this day well, I was doing my teeth, and I was feeling unhappy. I thought about this question again, and realised that I had been totally barking up the wrong tree. I wasn’t unhappy because of mucking things up in my life royally. Don’t get me wrong, I have a million regrets, but there was something more fundamental that was wrong. I had a eureka moment.

What made me unhappy in life wasn’t the things I did wrong, the mistakes I made, the things I didn’t do that I should have. What made me unhappy was how other people reacted towards me. That is what made me unhappy.

I didn’t have sleepless nights over the fact that I was a double-divorcee. I didn’t have sleepless nights over the fact that I had no degree. I didn’t have sleepless nights over the fact that I earned less, or didn’t look as pretty as others etc etc. I was unhappy because of what other people thought of me for the choices I made, and not for what I thought of myself!

I finally managed to get myself an answer to the advice I would give to myself, and to others if they asked me the big question:

Ignore other people’s opinions, for they will strangle the very life out of you.