Different paths
Many of us have a path that we’re heading down towards a certain goal.
- This can be a good thing but the trouble with it is that many of us feel that there’s only one path that we could possibly take in order to be happy.
- This can be due to pressure society puts on us to live a “normal” life or it could be pressure we put on ourselves.
So many people believe that you HAVE to go to college, HAVE to get married, and HAVE to have kids in order to have any chance at being happy.
High schools rarely tell students that there are ways to become successful without college. “You could go to trade school or start a business” is rarely the advice high school administrators give to their students.
They instead act like anyone who doesn’t go onto to get a college degree is doomed to a life of poverty.
This has led so many students to go to college when it wasn’t the right option for them. 43% of these students end up dropping out and gaining nothing but debt.
And many college graduates that majored in the liberal arts end up having to take jobs that don’t require a college degree. And still the push to take the “one and only true path” continues.
Finding My path
I struggled with this myself for years. You see, before becoming a life coach, I felt that the only way I could possibly achieve a career that would support me was to go to graduate school.
At the end of my college years, I was accepted into a few graduate schools for social work and was planning on attending right away.
But I was struggling a lot with my mental health so I had to put off going but I always planned on eventually going. I felt like a failure for putting graduate school off because I felt like I didn’t have enough skills to get a job where I could succeed without a graduate school diploma. I felt hopeless.
Fast forward 5 years later and I still believed that graduate school was the only path for me.
I had changed my mind several times about which graduate school to go to but I still completely believed that without graduate school I would be a failure. I had thought about social work, counseling, school library science, behavioral analysis, and school counseling.
They were different fields but they all required a Masters. It made me very anxious to think about all I would have to do to get into a graduate school and then deal with the pressures of being a graduate student. But then I learned about life coaching.
Not only did it not require a graduate degree, but it seemed like the perfect job for me because it involves helping people and I would get to work from home on my own schedule. And I found it so randomly.
I actually wasn’t even looking for something to do as a job. I was just looking to see if I could get trained in it in order to add something to my resume for graduate school. But as I looked into it it seemed more and more intriguing. I took a class in it and found it so fascinating.
I felt that I could help people through it, which has always been a passion of mine, without needing a graduate school degree. I don’t know for a fact if it will be the right path for me but I now realize that there are options.
Not every path is the same
I’m not alone in believing that there is only one path to success. Many people feel that they can only get a good job if they go to college.
They feel they can only have a fulfilling relationship if they get married. And they may feel they may only find deeper meaning in their lives if they have children.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with any of those paths. They do work very well for many people. But the fact is that they don’t work for everyone so they should not be marketed as the “only path that will make you happy.”
People are all different in so many ways. We all have different skills, different weaknesses, and different desires. What works amazingly for one person may work terribly for another.
And that’s ok. We just have to learn that it can take quite some time to figure out what path is right to take.
Whatever path you think that you need to take in order to become successful, it’s important to remember that there are other options out there.
There are literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of types of jobs out there. Given, you can’t try all of them but experiencing a few different ones can help you figure out more what you would like to do.
If we convince ourselves that there’s only one path then if that path is not working out we will feel like a failure. But it may be that we just need to try something different.
There’s a quote by Albert Einstein I always liked: “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it’s going to spend it’s whole life thinking its stupid.”
In order to continue to feel good about our futures we must all question our beliefs about “the one true path.”
Rachel Alison Kaplan, Life Coach
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