We only get about 9 decades, if we’re lucky.
First 10 (ages: 0 – 10): You’re figuring out that you’ve landed in this human body and what exactly that means: gravity, sharing, peeing/pooping, hunger, school, friendships.
Second 10 (ages: 11-21): You’re figuring out more complicated things like puberty and all of the emotions and weirdness that come along with that. You’re figuring out power dynamics and what money really means to your life and society.
Third 10 (ages: 22-33): Wowza. Now you’re adulting! You’re figuring out love and loss, paying taxes, and buying some self-help books because it hits you: everything you learned in school (besides reading and writing) did not prepare you for this.
Fourth 10 (ages: 34-44): Ok, you’re a little more confident about what’s happening here. But… what does it all mean? To what end?
Fifth 10 (ages: 45-55): Nowwwww you see. You’ve learned some tough lessons well enough to be able to share them; when you actually have enough time, peace and patience to do so with all of those kids or career changes running around.
Sixth 10 (ages: 56-66): You’ve made it somewhere near to retirement or you’ve retired. Good work! Now you run your time.
Seventh 10 (ages: 67-77): You’re doing whatever you want! Traveling; loving that worry-free PT job; making baked goods while you receive technology lessons from your grandkids; going back to college! You go!
Eighth 10 (ages: 78-88): You gain a new vision, a perspective that allows you to see what life has been. A birds-eye view where you see time has passed.
Ninth 10 (ages: 89-99): You prepare to rest. You have done a lot of work, raised a lot of people, made a lot of impact in your world; now, you rest.
If you were to imagine these sets of tens as books on a shelf, you’d only see nine books. That makes me wonder:
What do I want to know by the end of reading those nine books?
As a new decade approaches, we’re heading into a new book on our shelf. This book needs to fit into the grand scheme of your life’s purpose and mission. Whether you’re in book 1, 3, 5 or 7, your book serves its own purpose in the series.
Rarely do we take time to visualize our decades. We’re too hyper focused on our hours, days, weeks, months, years.
Our decades are important: they are what we look back on later when we’ve received our birds-eye vision.
Sheena Jeffers, Wellness Lifestyle Coach, MSEd
Download my FREE Decade View review + planning exercise.
Here is the one thing I hope you won’t forget next decade: You only get 9 tens, and you are worthy of an adventurous, joyful 9 tens that will result in a fulfilled, loving birds-eye vision so when you, one day, sit by and see all that you’ve lived, you’ll only be able to say: “Wow.”
Sheena Jeffers, MSEd, is a Wellness Lifestyle Coach helping clients design balance, boundaries and sustainable methods of flourish for their daily lives. Schedule a session with Sheena today and watch your life change!
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