You know what it's like to wake up at 75 years old and realize you wasted your life?
I hope not, and I hope you never do. I hope I never do, either.
But it happens. This hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, asked people in the last stages of life what their biggest regrets were, and the most common thing people said was they failed to live a life true to themselves and their dreams.
Screw that. It won't be me, you might be thinking. But I don't believe anyone sets out to waste his or her life, it just happens over the years when people never take the time to step out of the day-to-day and study the bigger picture of how they're living. People fall victim to status quo bias, the tendency for humans to stick to what they're already doing, even if change wouldn't cost much, and the decision about what to do is a significant one.
So I use my birthday, and what I've come to call my Birthday Check-In, as a way to make sure I never go more than a year without attending to my life on the deepest level. It's an annual regret-prevention measure.
The Birthday Check-In is like an executive meeting with yourself. As your own CEO, you look at the present state of you, plan ahead for your future, and cast a vision for who you want to be and where you want to go.
I started my Birthday Check-ins in my early 20s, when I found myself feeling hazily bad about life. I was seriously fearful about not hitting traditional milestones: marriage, kids, house, blah, blah, blah. It happens. Our society tells us every day that this is what life should look like. Then I remembered, "Oh yeah, I want to be a traveler and a writer. I vaguely want that other stuff, maybe, but mostly what I want is adventures and a career." Instead of focusing on what I couldn't control and what I wasn't even sure I wanted, I focused on what I could control and charging toward what I most wanted my life to be.
Your Check-In is a filter. It's asking yourself what you dealt with in your 42nd year that you're not going to deal with in your 43rd. Sometimes, your own behavior is what needs to go. One year, I said I was going to act with self-respect, because I realized I hadn't been. That word became my continual check-in throughout the year, and I no longer have to think about self-respect. It became a habit.
Sometimes the Birthday Check-Ins are just me saying, "Yeah, life kinda sucks right now," but those can be the most important ones. At my 28th Birthday Check-In, being in the business of me was not good. Me, Inc., was a broke and sinking enterprise. I promised myself that my finances and my job would be better by year 29, and they were. You have to face where you are now before you can shift toward where you want to be.
Sometimes life is fantastic at the time of my Birthday Check-In, and I'll just take myself out to a chocolate croissant to celebrate and plan my next adventure that year.
There are many ways to measure how it's going. Some coaches use the model of a wheel, where the spokes are career, finances, health, relationships, growth, fun, and lifestyle. You can rank each from 1 to 10. If you're doing well in all areas but a few, those few are where your wheel is flat, and where you may want to focus over the next 12 months.
The Birthday Check-In is not a New Year's resolution. You don't even have to make a plan to change anything, if you don't want to. The Check-In is just a time to zoom your view out from what you're doing this morning or this week to how your life is going in general. If you don't like what you see, then a plan for change might be in order.
It's also not about what anyone else thinks about your life. The internet is full of articles telling you what you should have done by 25, all the feelings you should have felt by 30, and other "essential" stopping points along someone else's idea of what your life should be. Forget that. It discounts where you started, what your struggles have been, and what you want for yourself. This Check-In is not about what society or your family thinks you should be doing with your life; it's about what you think you should be doing with it.
There will be some aspects you can't control. For example, I wish I had been a much more serious student, and I don't know, um, actually learned something in college? I regretted this for a long time before I realized, OK, I can start now. I used to panic walking into a bookstore, thinking about all I hadn't read. But now, years after I started a serious reading habit to fill in the gaps in my education, it's nice to feel like the bookstore is a comfortable home full of old buddies.
One rule of the Birthday Check-In is that you don't spend it feeling sad about your age. Do not apologize that time has passed since you were born. We think in America that we're X years old. We take it as a label on ourselves. But I like how age is expressed in Spanish. It's not "Yo soy 35" (I'm am 35). It's "Yo tengo 35 años" (I have 35 years). All the years you've lived are experiences you own, experiences you can build on, and your Birthday Check-In is about what you're going to give yourself during your next loop around the sun.
The Check-In doesn't have to be on your birthday, but schedule some time with yourself that week. I like to go to a coffee shop or a park with a great table. Then, just look at where your life is. If you're a journaler, journal. If you're a list maker, make lists: things you like about your life right now; things you don't like about it; things you're thankful for. You can even write an email to be delivered to yourself on your next birthday.
On birthdays ending in a 5 or 0, you may want to think about a loose plan for the next 5 or 10 years. It can seem scary, but the thing is that those years will pass anyway. If you take control of them, you can feel more like you're building a life you want, and less like life is just happening to you.
On your birthday, your friends and family will give you presents. The Birthday Check-In is about giving yourself something: a life you can look back on with a 75-year-old grin.
BONUS: Here are 10 questions you can ask yourself at your Birthday Check-In:
- What do I like about my life?
- What are some things I want to be different by next year?
- Who are the people who most add to my life?
- Who are the people that I know are toxic, or create drama in my life?
- What is the most important habit or activity to add or subtract from day-to-day living?
- How would I rate my life in the realms of career, finances, health, relationships, growth, fun, and lifestyle?
- What is something I can do to fix the area of my life that's most lagging?
- How can I remember my plan throughout the year?
- Who is someone I can trust to help me get to where I want to be over the next year?
- If there's a gap between where I am now and where I want to be, what's one step I can take now to close that gap?
