What Would I Tell My Younger Self

In this episode of The Reset Series, I reflect on one simple but powerful question: What would I tell my younger self? From learning to embrace failure and stop comparing myself to others, to protecting my peace and trusting that life unfolds in its own time, this is an honest conversation about the lessons that only experience can teach. Whether you’re navigating a fresh start, facing uncertainty, or simply taking a moment to reflect on your own journey, I hope this episode reminds you that every setback can become a new beginning. Because a reset isn’t about starting over, it’s about moving forward with greater wisdom.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the reset series. Today's episode is called What I'd Tell My Younger Self and this one's very personal for me. If you could sit down with your younger self for 20 minutes, what would you say? What would you want them to know and what would you warn them? Would you tell them to take a different path than they'd taken in the life that they have? Or would you simply thank them for surviving the things that they never thought they'd get through? I know I would. The truth is we all carry versions of ourselves inside us. The robunctious teenager, the uncertain young adult, the person who thought they had to have everything figured out by a certain age. But life doesn't work like that. Today is not about regret. I don't regret any of my decisions. It's about reflection. It's about recognising that the person you are today exists because every lesson and every season, every mistake, every risk, and every setback that came before today, that's how you got here. So come along with me and let's imagine we're sitting down across from our younger selves, and here's what I'd tell mine. The first thing I tell my younger self is slow down. Slow down in life. You don't have to have it all figured out. You're only 18. I'm speaking to my 18-year-old self or 30 self or 25 self. When we're young, we think everyone else knows exactly what they're doing. They don't, nobody has it figured out. Some people are just really good at making it look like they do. Most people are figuring it out one day at a time. And comparison steals more dreams than failure ever will. And anyone who plays the comparison joke knows this. If you compare your life to other people, you're going to be disappointed. Instead of asking, Am I ahead? Ask yourself, Am I growing? Because growth is not a race. There is no race in growth. It's so personal and so specific to the person. Life is not meant meant to be measured by how quickly we arrive at the destination, it's measured about who you become along the way. And I learned that throughout my whole life, and that's one thing I really wish my younger self had known. Failure isn't the opposite of success. I would tell my younger self to stop fearing failure. I spend so much time being afraid of making mistakes, so much time being afraid of failing when in reality I shouldn't have. Every single successful person in the world has failed. That's a fact. There is nobody on this planet that has not failed. Probably more times than you actually realize. Because failure is not a dead end, it's data, it sends a message to your brain, it's feedback, it tells you what went wrong and what you need to do to do it right the next time. Sometimes the job that you don't get pushes you towards the career that you were meant to have all along. This happens to so many people, or sometimes the relationship that ends creates room for the one that's right. As the saying goes, one door closes, another one opens. That is actually so true in life, and that's how you look at it. It's how you look at the situation. Sometimes when you lose everything, that teaches you what actually matters. So don't waste failures, learn from them. They might actually become some of the greatest teachers in your life. Another thing I would tell my younger self is to protect my peace. And this is a really, really important one because you do not have to arrive and attend every single argument that you're invited to. And when you're younger, you don't always realize that. Sometimes when you're younger, someone initiates an argument, somebody says something that hurts your feelings, and your instinct is to lash back, your instinct is to defend your reputation. But not every opinion deserves your attention, and the same with every single argument. You know, some people are gonna say things that are gonna hurt your feelings, or they're gonna say things that are not correct and they're not aligned with who you are and who you know you are. Why do you have to justify yourself to people? And that comes with age. That's something that I wish my younger self knew. Not every criticism deserves your energy, and that's just true. And as you get older, you realize that peace is so valuable that you will protect it at all cost, you will think about the relationships that you have, and you will not be around people who make you feel uncomfortable, who don't give you psychological safety, because you should spend time with people who celebrate your growth instead of competing with it, and that is something that I wish my younger self knew. When I was younger, I surrounded myself with friends who I thought were friends, and at the time they probably were. But as I grew up and as we grew up as a friend group, I started to realize that they weren't my friends because they weren't celebrating my success, they were only really present and really engaged in my life when I was on a downward spiral. When things weren't going good in my life, they were there, they were there in abundance. But when things were going good in my life, for instance, when I bought my home on my own as a single parent, they were nowhere to be seen. And they made comments like, you know, how will you afford that? I wouldn't have bought that house in that area. But these were all coming from a place of their own insecurities, they couldn't celebrate my growth, and that made me realize that these people are not really my friends. Distance yourself from constant negativity when you're younger, you kind of hang around with people and you're afraid to question the friendships because you don't want to be seen to be argumentative, awkward, or opinionated. So you go with the flow, you go with the crowd. But a lot of those people can be negative, those groups can be really negative and a negative space. So if I was telling my younger self, I would tell myself to distance yourself from people who are constantly negative because that's what I do now. I do not spend time with people who are negative, I can't cut them out of my life completely, but I won't spend any quality time with them because I just know when I leave that situation I'm going to feel like crap because they're so negative. And your environment shapes your future more than you think. So had I stayed with that friend group, and had I not removed myself from them when I saw that they weren't going to celebrate my success or my growth, I probably wouldn't have grown any further because I would have started believing what they were telling me and believing who they thought I was and what they wanted me to be. But by removing myself, that actually allowed me to grow into the person that I am today. I wish for myself that I had been myself earlier. I wish I had stopped trying to be other people and what everyone else wanted me to be, and just be completely comfortable in my own skin. And that definitely only came with age. One of the biggest regrets people have, it's not really making mistakes, it's pretending to be someone that they're not. When you're trying to fit in, when you're trying to impress people who won't even remember your name five years from now, and that's a fact. The sooner you're comfortable being yourself, the happier you'll become. And they're my friends because they like me, they love me for me, because I'm me. I'm not trying to be anybody other than who I am, and therefore they like me for who I am. And when you're pretending to be somebody, that attracts the wrong people because they're only getting around you and wanting to be friends with you because of who you're pretending to be, but you're not like them, so you're pretending to be a certain person and they want to be friends with you based on that, that's never going to lead anywhere good. You don't need everybody to like you, you just need to like the person looking back at you in the mirror, and that's a really, really strong message, it's really important. It doesn't matter if everybody likes you or not, they're not going to. Even now, as an adult, I know there's people who don't like me for no reason other than they might just not like the way I look, the way I talk, how I live my life, but I like what looks back at me in the mirror, and that is what matters the most to me. You should always invest in your future self. So you should think to yourself, where am I going to be in five years? And is what I'm doing right now going to stand to me in five years' time? So, for instance, read more books, be curious, want to know more about the world, spend more time engrossed in things that are interesting and fun and enjoyable, more than scrolling on social media, looking at fake news or the fake worlds that people show you. Look after your health. You might be young, but when you're older, you're going to appreciate the investment that you've made in your own health. Exercise. It's so good for your body, it's so good for your physical health, but it is also so good for your emotional well-being. And save money, don't spend everything that you get. Take a percentage of your salary and agree that you're going to save it for a rainy day. It doesn't have to be a house, it doesn't have to be anything, but it will show you that it's good to save, and throughout your whole life, you'll always have a little pot of money there, and that is definitely something that I always did as a young person because I became a mother really young, and I always had to have money, and I had to be responsible with money. So that's what I would say to a younger person now is always be safe with your money and always have a little bit to fall back on, and learning new skills. I don't think you can ever go wrong with that, and it doesn't matter what age you are, if you want to take up a sport, if you want to join the gym, if you want to learn how to play an instrument, you can do this at any point. And I suppose one thing that really, really is important is call your parents more often than you think you should because they're not going to be around forever, and as you get older you start to appreciate people in your life a lot more. When you're younger, you kind of just think your parents are going to be there forever, and you think the people you love are going to be there forever, and then one day they're not, and you can no longer call them, and that's when it becomes really important that you make the calls. So call your parents more often or call the people that you love more often and tell them how you feel about them. Spend less time proving yourself online and more time building yourself offline. And what I mean by that is like you don't have to prove yourself, you don't have to prove that you're eating in the nicest restaurant, you don't have to prove that you're going to the best holidays. Who are you proving yourself for? Build yourself away from social media into the best person that you want to be, and that will be much more rewarding than posting pictures of who you think the world wants to see. Every single decision you make is moving towards who you're going to be in your future self. That's just the truth. Hundreds of tiny decisions make consistency over the years. That's honestly how I built the life that I have now. I didn't just decide three years ago or five years ago to be who I am today, to have what I have in my life and be as successful as I am. I just didn't. Every single decision I made, and they were hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions I made up until now, have led to the point that I'm at today. The future version of you is built by the habits you choose today, not what you choose in ten years, that's not gonna matter. It's what you do every single day to get to that point, is what's gonna lead up to the big, big change. And I suppose my reflection is if I could truly meet my younger self, I actually don't think I'd change everything. I think I'd let my younger self make some of the same mistakes that I made. I think I'd let them experience what it's like to have your heart broken. I think I'd let them experience what it's like to fail. Because those experiences created the person who's talking to you all today. They made me who I am. I would simply remind my younger self that you are stronger than you think, that you don't ever have to earn your worth with anybody, that you keep showing up no matter what life throws at you because you are strong. Keep learning, be kind, be curious, but be respectful of other people and be respectful of yourself. Never ever be afraid to begin again. You can start over any minute, any hour of any day. You get the choice to start over because life is not about getting everything right, it's just not, it's about continuing to grow every single day and being open to that growth. That's what a reset really is. It's not starting over, it's starting wiser. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spending these moments with me. I really hope that today's episode resonated with some of you, and I hope that you take the time to think about your younger self and maybe write your younger self a little letter. Maybe write your younger self that letter and tell your younger self that it's okay and that everything you did led to the point that you're at today. And maybe when you think about it for a minute, maybe you were meant to make all those mistakes because had you not have made those mistakes, you wouldn't be the wonderful person that you are today. Thanks for listening to the reset series.