Why Waiting to Change Your Life is Risky
There are days when your life will change forever, in an instant, and never be the same again. You don’t know it is coming. You haven’t prepared for it. It just happens to you. That happened to me when we were still living in Ireland.
I was facilitating a meeting for a group of businesswomen when my phone rang as we broke for lunch, and my husband’s name flashed on the screen.
“That’s strange,” I thought. He never phones me if he knows I am hosting a business meeting. But when I answered, the voice at the end of the line wasn't my husband's. It was a paramedic.
“I am calling to let you know that your husband has been in a car crash.” I can’t put into words how getting that sort of call feels. “Is he OK?” I managed to blurt out.
“He is trapped in the car. The fire brigade is working on getting him out, and we have doctors with him,” she said. “But is he OK?” I insisted. “He is conscious, and the doctors are with him right now” is all she would say. But I already knew it was serious. First, I knew if it wasn’t serious, he would have called me himself. Second, they don’t call doctors out to the scene unless it is serious.
Thankfully, the meeting I was hosting was in a hotel just a 10 minute drive from the hospital. One of the women in the meeting rushed me to the hospital and sat with me while I waited. But it was a whole agonising hour waiting before the ambulance finally got to the hospital because they had to cut the roof off the car to get him out and the doctors had to give some initial treatment before they could transport him.
That hour was, without doubt, the longest and worst hour of my life. Not knowing what state he was in was torture. I usually have a positive mindset but, in that moment, it deserted me. My mind ran riot about the possibilities – are his injuries life threatening? Am I going to have to go home and tell a little boy his daddy isn’t coming home? (My son was only six then). All our dreams for the family life we had planned together felt like they were hanging in the balance.
After what felt like an eternity, a doctor came to speak to me. “Your husband is going to be OK. He has several broken ribs and is having some difficulty breathing, his legs and stomach are badly cut and bruised but he will be OK.” The feelings of relief were like a tidal wave. Although he was in a bad way, knowing that he would fully recover over time was a massive relief.
Considering the severity of the crash, he was lucky to be alive. And we both knew it. It was a hell of a wake up call. You see, my husband and I had been designing each new chapter of life and work on our own terms since we left our corporate careers several years earlier. But this awful experience made us realise we had become complacent. We had started to drift a bit. It reminded us that we needed to get back on the case and proactively design our next chapter. As a result, we ended up leaving Ireland and heading to Canada to start a new life. Something we had dreamed of years earlier.
Here’s why waiting to change your life is risky:
It is easy to think you have plenty of time to create the life you want for yourself. We seem to have a natural tendency to believe there is always tomorrow. Well, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t!
The reality is that you don’t know when something will suddenly happen that will rob you of the opportunity to have the life you want with the people you want.
Yet many people want to change something in their lives, work, or businesses but put it off or never do it for various reasons.
For example, maybe they find creating change hard, don’t know where to start, and struggle with the uncertainty and uncomfortable feelings that come with it, like fear. Maybe they have crushing self-doubt and struggle to believe they can do it.
But letting those sorts of things hold you back or keep you stuck are risky because if you aren’t designing your life, you are leaving it to chance. That is a hell of a gamble to take with your one and only life.
You get one shot at life. Take your shot.
