Leadership Thought #205 – The Importance of New Beginnings
Another school year starts for my kids today. It’s hard to believe that the summer has passed, and we are easing into another Fall. Time moves by so quickly. I hope they had a nice summer break. I still have many fond memories of my summers as a child. As a parent, I believe one of our primary jobs is to create the conditions for positive experiences that lead to long-term, happy memories for our children. It is also to help our kids prepare for and embrace change and new beginnings as a part of life.
A new school year is a new beginning. The first day is a blank slate. The upcoming year is full of opportunities to learn new things, make new friends, undergo physical changes, have new experiences, and discover new aspects of yourself. School years are the perfect laboratories for change. There will be ups and downs, but there is also a natural conclusion that leads to the next series of changes—it is a cycle. I’m glad someone created the yearbook concept so that kids can have a record of what happened.
As adults, our changes are less structured and usually more self-imposed, except for the inevitable physical changes that come with aging. We also tend to have much longer periods of time between what would qualify as new beginnings. Sometimes, we are forced to undergo major changes by external events or the actions of others; however, thankfully, these experiences are usually rare. We generally hold the power to control our own fate.
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of new beginnings. My mom used to say that every person has four seasons in their lives, and each one is an opportunity to reinvent oneself and use the wisdom gained up until that point to make better decisions. As I age, I understand more of what she meant. I also believe that within these seasons there are natural changes such as completing your schooling, getting married (maybe more than once), having kids, becoming a homeowner, embarking on a career, being at the peak of your career and having responsibility for other people, caring for aging parents, having your own kids move out and start their own lives, becoming a grandparent, retiring from work, and navigating our “golden years” that seem to happen and lead to new beginnings. I do respect the fact that not everyone opts for all these changes, but they are common experiences shared by most of us.
Instead of resisting change or passively letting it happen to you, I encourage you to proactively embrace it as a natural part of life, just as school is for our children. New beginnings are a critical part of existence and a key component of happiness. When you approach them with the right spirit and attitude, good things tend to happen. In addition, you broaden rather than narrow the definition of who you are as a person, which can only ever be a good thing. The yearbook we receive at the end of our lives is the culmination of our experiences, the quality of our relationships, and how we have changed and hopefully grown as a person along the way. It is supposed to be a thick book with many sections filled with pictures and joyful memories. It is a record of who we are and how we lived.
