During a recent shopping trip, I overheard a conversation between a mother and her young daughter about a new outfit the little girl wanted. The little girl could barely contain her excitement over the new "big girl" pants she could grow into. The mother and I shared a chuckle about the inevitable turning point in the little girl's life when she would be buying a smaller sized outfit with hopes to shrink into it.
As we transition from childhood to adulthood, this shift in perspective is not limited to the size of our hips and waist. Our perspective can also change about other areas of our lives, such as career. When we were fresh out of high school and college, many of us felt we could conquer the world. We infused our lack of experience with the confidence we could "grow into" any position we aimed for by applying persistence and spunk.
Then, over time, life happened. I often overhear conversations about a job search or career change that contain little, if any excitement. It would be nice to hear adults speak with the same excitement about life change as the little girl did about hers. We adults could think in terms of what we want to grow into--that is, what we want to expand and become--instead of focusing on the smaller, limiting size of what we believe our skills can "fit" or "shrink" into. We shrink into things based on what we already know, in contrast to expanding into what we could become. Instead of thinking about the type of work and career that would bring us joy and challenge us to be more than our present selves, we limit our thinking to what we can do with only our particular degrees, skill set, and experience.
What if we challenged our thought process to serve our creative soul? This first requires some time to play and let creativity bubble; then we can consider what we dare to grow into. Once we regain hope in the future of possibility and revel in the excitement of change, we align with the childhood dreamer in all of us. And if we need help remembering this part of ourselves, we could borrow someone's little girl and take her shopping!
(Thank you to Robert Norton at http://www.nortondesigns.net/ for touching up my photo from Luckenbach, Texas, where, by the way, "Everybody's Somebody in Luckenbach")
