It is time to address the elephant in the room.
I am 25 years old and I am a business coach.
The favorite question of all brave (or rude) skeptics is “How can you be a business coach when you are this young?” There are other blog posts where I talk about my experience, my intuition, my education, but here I am going to talk about one (because yes, there are many) of the advantages of working with a coach who is young.
The young are still alive to the possibilities that exist in the world.
The young dream bigger, think more freely, set goals that are irrational, and pursue visions that the world would tell them are “unrealistic”. (Side note there is no evidence to suggest that more realistic goals are actually more achievable). Young people are taught to aim high for themselves. Our blood still courses with the hormones that make us feel invincible and make us believe we can climb any mountain, build any empire, and conquer any obstacle.
Over our lives, that optimism (or perhaps obstinence) is beat out of us. Everyone and everything around us seems to encourage us to think small or “more realistic”. The media, our own doubts, and even or family and friends seems to constantly be telling us that we can’t do things or that certain things are too big for us. As we age, that effect compounds like a high interest rate. Year after year we get beat down by external voices and influences. Year after year each forgotten new years resolution, each pound gained when we wanted to loose, each missed opportunity in our market shows up pretending to be proof of inadequacy. Year after year our insecurities can feed off any small failures to grow louder in their assistance that we simply CAN’T. Can’t succeed. Can’t do it. Can’t possibly achieve all that we can dream. And so people stop dreaming big
or dreaming at all.
I have been quoted saying “I would rather be hurt than be jaded” Now this was in reference to my categorical refusal to be suspicious of my husband EVER, but it applies to this conversation nicely. I would rather fail than stop myself from dreaming. I would rather fail over and over and over again than to give up on things before I even try. In this one area, I am aging at a snail’s pace.
I REFUSE to shrink my perception of what is possible for me
I OBSTINATELY do not give up even when every indicator tells me now is the time to move on (Why hello there May of 2020).
I COMPLETELY believe that my value grows with each year (which by the way is a RADICAL choice for a Woman to make and highly recommend it.)
I CONTINUALLY challenge myself to think bigger and ask more of myself and more of the world.
The secret sauce of youth is the expansiveness of our vision. Go into any second-grade class and the kids are dreaming of being astronauts, and noble laurates, and the President. Nevermind that very few people get to be those things, the young are comfortable dreaming those things.
Work with a young coach because I can teach you hope. Work with a young coach because I can infect you with invincibility. Work with a young coach because I can challenge your worn-down view of what might be possible and expand your vision to all the abundance that is available.
And work with a young coach right now.
Work with a young coach in December, in the old age of the year when the hopes and dreams of last January have been beaten down all year. The same thing that happens across our lives is mirrored in each year. We start with so many ideas about what we can do, be, and have, but by December we have shrunk them. We have shrunk our goals and our image of ourselves (often once again for some abstract idea of “realistic”). Don’t start the year feeling all that smallness.
Work with a young coach to cast a vision for your future that is oh so much more than what you can imagine for yourself in the winter of 2020.
There is one spot left in my virtual New Years Eve planning retreat. I think I’ve been saving it for you. And if you need one more reason to work with me now as opposed to later, remember, my value increases each and every year and therefore, so do my prices.