Childhood Dreams & Secret Ambitions

One of the exercises I like to use with my coaching clients (and also included in New Horizons) is to have you do an overview of your life. Break down your life by decades and write a short, descriptive paragraph about each one from birth to your current age. Then, looking back over your life, identify key turning points that have helped shape who you are today. Reflecting back on your childhood, what were your dreams and secret ambitions?

Doing this exercise myself, I realized that a summer spent reading Beverly Gray Mysteries had a powerful impact on my life. Growing up, I spent every summer at my grandparent's house because my parents both worked. Before you start feeling sorry for me, however, you need to realize that my "Nana" and 'Paw Paw" lived on the largest recreational lake in Indiana. My days were spent swimming, waterskiing, playing water tag, bike riding to the candy store, and swinging on an old rope swing. The mild summer evenings involved catching fireflies in glass jars, playing tag in the dark, and telling ghost stories under the big oak tree.

Despite having what I thought at the time to be an unreasonable amount of yardwork and household chores to help my grandparents, I still managed to spend a great deal of time with my nose in a book. One summer I discovered the Beverly Gray Mystery series that my mother had read as a child. The main character led the exciting life of a newspaper reporter who traveled to exotic places and led what I thought at the time to be the ideal lifestyle.

I loved writing and traveling to all corners of the world held an incredible amount of intrigue for me. Unlike the author that penned these exciting tales, Beverly Gray never got married (at least not by the conclusion of the last book in the series). I was sure that this would be the path that my own life took as well. However, that was not to be the case. At 22, I met my husband and five children later, I haven't solved a single international mystery and my sleuthing has been reduced to uncovering who left the freezer door open all night when none of the occupants of the house admit to doing it.

Am I bitter? Not at all! I love my family and the less-than-fairytale life that we lead. But when I first made this realization, it helped me to clarify my vision for the life I wanted to create after the full-time responsibilities of motherhood were no longer part of my daily reality.

I did, in fact, work as a reporter for a short time when I was younger and have no desire to include newspaper work in my future. But writing is still a part of my every day life and I know that it always will be. One clue that I had from revisiting this childhood dream was that I never want to "retire" in the traditional sense of the word. I know that in a few short years, I will have the freedom to travel and speak around the world -- and hopefully before I'm Jessica Fletcher's age! Although Angela Lansbury's character in the 1980's TV show, Murder, She Wrote, certainly seems to be a positive image of the kind of adventurous life I still have to look forward to!!