Adulting is a big subject, as you know, and there is no one right way to do or be an adult. And there is no magick do it/fix it/be it button that any of us can push and bingo, we are there. It is an ongoing process that we live and refine and expand and deepen.
Adulting is not something we get up and go do. Time to feed the cat. Time for work. Time to get something to eat. Gotta go adulting. No. We must consciously choose to become an adult -mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our bodies do the work automatically for us physically in aging us but aging physically does not guarantee that we will become an adult. You see lots of grown people in our world behaving like adolescents or children. Further, we won’t somehow become adults once we get that job or house or relationship that we’ve been wanting. It is fine to want and to have those things, they just won’t deliver you to adulthood. Those things may saddle you with more responsibility but they won’t, in and of themselves, deliver that magical quality of being an adult.
Becoming and being an adult is a choice that must be made consciously. It isn’t something that can happen by default or osmoses or just by being successful. We all must find our own way. There will be no one right way and no one wrong way to adult. There is no playbook but there are things that we can do and become that will get us ever closer to the goal. There are lots of choices to be made along the way. “What if I make a wrong choice?” You will. We all do. The point is to forgive yourself and then make a new and, hopefully, better choice.
One of the choices we learn over time to make is to show up and direct our impact. When you find yourself in a situation where either you are needed and have been called upon or just happen to find yourself - show up. That means bringing all of you, your strengths, talents, your abilities, your intellect, your compassion etc., – to the situation in trying to help ensure a positive and responsible outcome. It is about consciously directing the positive impact you are wanting to have on others or in a situation. That doesn’t mean the outcome will always go the way you are intending as there are always other humans involved in the process. However, you will be able to look at yourself in a mirror and be proud of what you contributed, proud of how you conducted yourself.
Be as present as you can and bring as much of the best of you as you can. Leave trying to be perfect out of the equation.
Secondly, Adults know when to call a time out, if you will. To take a step back. Take a breath. The old truth - think before you speak will save you more problems and heartache than you can imagine. Be sure before you decide to fight, bleed and die on some hill that the principle or idea or perspective you are willing to die for is still something that you either believe or still has real value and is important for you. And that, whatever it is you feel so strongly about is actually applicable to the situation you find yourself encountering. Also, put life on pause every so often to take some time to replenish when you need it. We all need time to replenish and recharge.
Thirdly, adults continually add to their self-esteem. Now I have posted a two-part blog post and a two-part podcast about a process that, if worked with, will not only help you generate a real and tangible self-esteem that you can lean on, but it can also potentially change who you are and change your life. It did mine when I learned it. It is also essential to adulthood. It is an on-going process and practice of self-care whose benefits cannot be overstated. Remember, real self-esteem is not some ego-driven excuse to make everything all about you. This process is indispensable to becoming and being an adult.
Adults put their best foot forward out of respect for themselves. Even when you don’t have but 25% to give whomever or whatever, you give the best 25% you can. For many, settling for being mediocre, just getting by, doing just enough, is all many think is required. In truth, a life of mediocrity is seriously soul crushing. In mediocrity, there is no soaring, there is no experiencing the heights. There is no transcendence. And there is no magic.
Adults trust. They learn to trust themselves – beginning with knowing and trusting their own mental and emotional processes. When you really are conversant with knowing and trusting your process, you will then have a sturdy foundation on which to build the ability to trust yourself and others. Trust is also integral to self-esteem. And there is a blog and podcast devoted to trust available to you as well.
Adults are flexible. Are you flexible enough to change? Are you flexible enough to let love change you? Are you flexible enough to grow and change? Are you flexible enough to do something or many things differently? Change your beliefs? Change the choices you habitually make? This is a very big subject. But just looking at how flexible or inflexible you are is a great way into some very valuable self-reflection. Adults self-reflect.
And, yes, adults do enjoy their lives and have fun – lots of it. Only fun changes and evolves over time, as it should. Everybody may have loved your slow cooker chili in college, and you may have been a great cook back then and you may still love cooking for those you love and care about. However, your repertoire hopefully will have grown and expanded by now. You get the point. But yes, have fun and enjoy the gift of your life. Keep expanding and exploring new ways to have fun and let go of things that aren’t so much fun anymore.
Now, all of the above, if nothing else, will get you a long, long way toward and even into real honest-to-goodness adulting. But wait, there’s more. Adulting is an on-going process. In the process of growth, there is always more.
One last quality of being an adult and for many, this is very hard. Adults are future oriented and always looking to the future we want to create. When many of us think about the future, we simply take our past and throw it into the future with the intent that it will have all of the good things that we have liked about our life, but that the future will be an even better version of that past. Or, for the pessimists, we don’t expect anything to change and resign ourselves to it, hoping it really won’t be all that bad. Now there are all sorts of permutations about what we want and/or expect our future to be like. Humans like continuity, comfort, safety, having a sense of belonging. There is nothing wrong with any of that, to a point. There is nothing wrong wit h having cherished traditions or rituals or favorite activities or whatever that we want our future to contain. Certainly not. But, as mentioned above, adults are flexible. Be willing to be flexible about even the good stuff we take from our past and throw out there in front of us, hoping it will be part of our future.
Now, we aren’t going to get sidetracked here discussing the future as it is a very big subject and is really a topic for another day. But here is the rub. What about the stuff you can’t imagine for your future? No matter how limited or expansive our imaginations are, it still has limits. 20 years ago, no one would have imagined living through the Great Recession, COVID, the spread and ubiquity of social media, the ability to have your McDonald’s and Starbucks delivered to your house, CGI driven movies, a Black President, school shootings, electric cars, or streaming. Yet here we are. All of us, in our lives, lived through things – good and bad, that we couldn’t have foreseen or imagined. In your forward thinking, be willing to hold space for the stuff you can’t yet imagine - good stuff, different stuff, and stuff that will call upon your strengths to deal with.
So how do we get there? How do we even begin to be the forward looking, future building adults we want to be and are capable of being?
It starts with – What qualities do you value in yourself and others? What are the things you strive for? I’ll give you an example. When I wrote the series on Dating, I wrote about qualities I would value in a relationship – Trust, Loyalty, Respect, Responsiveness, Mutual Reliance, Intimacy, Passion. And, in order to have those things with someone else, I have to develop those qualities within myself. Those qualities are ideals that I strive for in who I am becoming though I will never fully reach them. I will never perfectly be 100% of any of those things, but as I strive toward those ideals, I will be more of them as I move into my future.
What are your ideals? Happiness? Joy? Wisdom? Truth? Love? Kindness? Compassion? Dignity? Hope? Well-being? Freedom? Perseverance? Responsibility? Imagination? Creativity? In pursuing those ideals in your life, what are the things you will and won’t do in that pursuit? For example, suppose happiness is one of the ideals you decide to pursue in the living of your life. What things will you and won’t you do to bring yourself closer to that ideal? Suppose you decide that, “Well, being able to do whatever I want whenever I want makes me happy, regardless of the impact it might have on others.” Is that really OK with you? Would it be OK to lie to someone (or yourself) in order to be happy? Would it be Ok to be hurtful, neglectful, or irresponsible toward someone, manipulating them into doing what I want them to do in order for me to be happy? Yes, I am exaggerating to make the point. That said, the things we will and won’t do in pursuit of our goals and ideals form our principles.
As you look to build your future, what ideals, like becoming a more understanding person, are worth aiming for? What principles will you adhere to in that quest? They will set the tone and tenor of so much of that future. Adults have ideals and they also develop the principles that they employ in the pursuit of those ideals. What lines, what boundaries will you and won’t you cross in seeking to be happy or truthful or persevering or understanding or compassionate? I will be responsible in my striving for happiness but I won’t be capricious or reckless or thoughtless in that same pursuit. The more we hold to those positive principles and the less we cross the boundary into those negative principles, the things we told ourself we wouldn’t do – lie, cheat steal, gossip, being unkind or thoughtless, or whatever – the more character we will develop and the more self-knowledge we will have.
Adults develop ideals that they strive for in their growth and principles of how they choose to live their lives – the things they consistently will and won’t do in the living of their lives. And when you combine ideals and principles, their synergy produces character. Adults develop character.
One last thing about values. Make sure that the values you choose to live by are yours and not those given to you along the way by parents, relatives, friends, co-workers, or whomever. Now, you may decide – consciously – that some of the values you’ve picked up along the way are fine and you want to keep them. And that is fine as long as it is your choice and not something you have chosen to adopt out of some sense of obligation or duty. A couple of examples.
FOMO. I have heard from clients and friends about the pressure they feel to keep up with everything and everyone in order to make sure they aren’t missing out on anything. Now, they often feel that that pressure is coming from others but in truth, they are choosing to put that pressure on themselves and live with it. I know of a young woman who is very accomplished in her career and works very very hard. She then goes home and gets on line where she spends hours trying to keep up with family, friends, trends, the latest going on with everybody, everywhere, about everything. This is obviously impossible. When does she squeeze in time for her live-in partner? When does she take time to decompress, for her own sanity? Whose rule is it that she or any of us must keep up on everything or we might miss out? Miss out on what? Of all she strives to keep up on or that any of us would try to keep up with, it can’t all have equal value for us. We have to learn to pick and choose what has value to us in the living of our lives and learn to let other things go.
I read recently that so many Millennial women and men have reached a point of exhaustion trying to be the perfect parent. They are bombarded with endless blogs, podcasts, videos, full of advice on what they must do in order to be the perfect parent who produces the perfect children who are over achievers and exceptional and are competitive to get into the best prs-schools, and who will excel at everything and if they don’t, they have failed as parents. They overschedule themselves and their kids in activities that keep them on the move constantly with their 100% focus on the exceptional development of their kids, leaving no time to maintain their relationships with anyone, often including their spouses – beside the division of labor of childrearing tasks – except for the time they can steal to document their lives for social media. The question would be, who are you living your life for? Who told you that the endless assault of information of what you must do trumps what you might figure out and enjoy living on your own? Humanity has somehow managed to survive 10,000 years without being enthralled to all of the self-appointed experts who have an opinion about how you should live your life and raise your kids and do it all perfectly.
What are the ideals you want to pursue? What are your principles that you live by? What do you value and are they your values or did you pick them up from someone else? Know why you value what you value.
Finally, a few other things to think about. Who are performing your life for? When I was in graduate school, one of my professors introduced me to the idea of the insentient other. The insentient other is the person or people or deities in the back of our minds who we feel is always watching us with an approving or disapproving eye and we tailor our lives, our behaviors, our goals, everything we do is either for their approval or to be more like them and, in being like them, gaining their approval. That insentient other can be a parent, sibling, some other relative, or teacher or clergy member or some public figure. They can be someone we admire or someone whose censure we fear. For some, it is God’s judgment we run from, rather than becoming the kind of person we’d be unafraid to present to our Maker.
Keeping someone always present in the back of our mind to whom we perform our lives – friends, family, co-workers, society – the folks up in the cheap seats, is a behavior that has been around for a very long time. What has made it ever more complicated is the age of social media in which we now live. We aren’t playing our lives to someone we keep in the back of our minds. We are playing our lives very publicly to anyone who will watch and listen. Everything we do, say, think, everywhere we go, gets documented and presented to what we hope will be an adoring public for their approval. This is crazy making and, at its extreme, can wind up exhausting you and alienating you from yourself because, in truth, the attention and approval you are seeking needs to come from you. The standards on which you evaluate yourself, your goals, hopes, dream desires, you character, etc., needs to come from you. That doesn’t mean you are oblivious to feedback you get along the way. But it does mean that you become the final authority – ever growing, ever changing, ever expanding – who gets the final word on your life and who you are choosing to be and become.
If you find yourself playing your life to either the cheap seats or to some particular other who is always present in the back of your mind, always watching, always judging, begin taking your power back. It will be a process that will take time but, in the end, you will be way more empowered, less exhausted, and healthier physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. “They” may never give you the approval you seek and desire. But as you begin to be the one to evaluate and approve of yourself, it will be like the credit card commercial says – “Priceless.”
As we talked about when we talked about self- esteem, some people get their self-esteem from what they intend to do some day, but they never get around to it. Never finding the time or the means or the method of initiating those plans, projects, goals. But they derive their self-esteem from their intention to someday do or be whatever. Or the goals set are unrealistic or fanciful. “I intend to be the influencer of all influencers forever.” I will become the perfect . . . whatever.” “I will never have a bad day or a down moment or make a mistake.” You get the idea. Certainly, set goals and hopes and dreams and then begin taking realistic steps toward implementing them, realizing that it won’t happen overnight. You will make mistakes along the way that you can learn from. And you will learn about yourself and your abilities and strengths and ability to persevere along the way. One more thing, remember that self- esteem comes from a self-evaluation process that you conduct within, not from something outside of yourself. For further information, we have blog posts and podcasts on self-esteem available to you.
This goes along with who are you playing your life to? When you do something well or right or do something good for someone else, is it enough for you to know or do you need to tell everybody? Adults are content with that knowledge within themselves. When they act with integrity – doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do, even when no one else is looking, holding tenaciously to their principles – it is enough for them to know. It needn’t be broadcast.
Do you have your own definition of success? What does success mean to you? What would be fulfilling? We don’t all need or want the same things and most often, however much we may enjoy the things, the trappings (car, house, job, etc.) that success may bring, those trappings rarely bring the fulfillment we anticipate from being successful. How do you define success?
Regarding self-esteem, developing character, and operating within your principles - Are you one of those people who believes that the ends justify the means or that the ends never justify the means – getting there at any price, by any means. Life is a process and everything we do and seek is part of that process. As we strive for what we want out of life, how we get there is all that matters. The means never justify the ends. Ever. It is how you get there, wherever and whatever there is, and who you become in the process is all that matters. So, are you adding, in a positive sense, to who you are becoming?
As you can see, adulting is not about doing so much as it is about being but that is true for life. All of the above are things to think and feel about and apply as life calls on you be more and more the adult in a world where there are too many people with grown bodies who have never progressed beyond being children or adolescents. In our society, you see society tolerating behaviors from other adults that we would never abide in our kids. Become more and more of an adult. Bring that light to a world that needs it. You will be amazed how it will improve your life. It won’t always be a walk on the beach but in the end, the peace of mind; the self-esteem and self-value; the strengths and abilities; you’ll learn and develop will be worth every ounce of effort expended in that process of becoming a true adult.
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Living Skills offers positive psychology counseling, spiritual counseling, and life coaching services in Atlanta, and online. We are sensitive to the needs of the LGBT community. Sessions available by Skype. Please email us at livingskillsinc@gmail.com or visit www.livingskills.pro. Podcast: “The Problem with Humans” now available on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, and Podfriend, as well as on my site. Follow us on Twitter - @livingskillsinc; on Instagram – livingskillsatlanta; You Tube - Living Skills@livingskillsinc, Facebook - Living Skills, Inc
