What if you started from here? 

What if? It is a powerful phrase; powerful when we are imagining our futures, imagining what might lie ahead, the good and the not-so-good, because contingency plans are often useful. 

However, if we dwell on the backward looking ‘what if’ then we will be led down paths which wind and roam vast areas only to end up back where we started. Humans have a tendency to wish we’d started earlier, made different choices, taken a different path. 

I was once asked in a therapy session where I was expressing my deep unhappiness in my marriage and my choices, “What if you had left years ago when you discovered he had cheated on you?” And I stopped for a moment and imagined … then realised that choosing to stay – while a choice taken mostly from fear of being a single mother – that choice allowed me to continue my education, to do my degrees, take my MA. It allowed me to be less stressed with the children, it allowed them a ‘normal’ family unit. It allowed me to take part-time work, start a business, and be there for them before and after school, at weekends, during holidays. All things I would have never achieved, or found challenging to do so. 

So, instead of dwelling on what-might-have-been I thought about what I had achieved even through a choice made by constraint. I reframed everything as a ‘starting from now’. I took my experiences and weaved them into a future I never imagined all those years ago. 

In any situation in life, ‘starting from here’ can be a radical reframe. Not wanting to start from where you wish you were, but to start from exactly where you are right now. 

Take stock of where you are right now – your experiences, knowledge, perspectives, hard-won wisdom. Write a list, start a spreadsheet. Create something pretty or make it basic and functional. Look at your life, everything you have achieved, even the failures because that is where you often learn most. See the potential, the possibilities. Uncover where you can transfer skills on your journey to where you’d like to go. 

When I did this for myself, what surprised me most was how much I had. Not in a triumphant way, more like opening a drawer you had forgotten about and finding it full. Things I had dismissed as circumstantial turned out to be skills. Roles I had fallen into turned out to have taught me something irreplaceable. The winding path, when I actually looked at it, had a logic I hadn’t been able to see while I was walking it.

I didn’t figure out my next chapter in an afternoon. But I started to see the shape of it. And that was enough to take the next step.

So, the question isn’t, “What if I had taken another path?”, the action is to look around you and discover what is actually available to you at this exact spot where you are now. 

You have my loving permission (and a thermos of good coffee) to stop apologising for where you are and to start looking at what you have to get you to your destination.

If you are sitting with your own version of this, the list half-written, the possibilities half-visible, and you would like someone to think it through with you, that is exactly what I am here for, come and find me.