Letters to my younger self

With 20/20 hindsight, perhaps we might all act differently? What would you say to your younger self if you could?

In this reflective episode, I write a letter to my younger self: the ballsy, overthinking, self-conscious, occasionally reckless young woman who survived an ordeal in Sri Lanka at 21, was in Vietnam lead tours just one year later, and later navigated two babies under two while building a business in nap times, daycare, grit and pigheadedness.

You’ll hear:

• Why regretting what you didn’t do is far more costly than regretting what you did.
• Why the poverty mentality so many of us carry is a psychological hurdle, rarely a financial reality.
• The biggest thing I would tell my younger self to take far more seriously (hint: it’s not marketing).
• A simple thing on my desk that feeds my self-compassion so I can take bigger risks, with bigger payoffs, in business.

This episode is for anyone who’s feeling like a failure, like a fool, like the boat has sailed, and they’re too late. We can always have a re-do.

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.

Welcome back listeners. This season is all about failure because I’m fun like that. Yes. Today I’m going to write a letter to my younger self, and where are you involved in this? Well, I hope that this inspires you to write a letter to your younger self too because if you are feeling like a failure, or feeling like a fool, feeling a bit dried up or washed out, or like you missed the boat and it’s well and truly sailed—and what are you going to do? Oh my God. Stop, slow down, sit quietly, preferably in the forest with your hair in the moss, and write yourself a letter to your younger self.

I don’t know about you, but my youngest self was ballsy. I had a psychotic episode overseas in Sri Lanka at the age of 21. I went from having the best year of my life to having the worst year of my life, all in one fell swoop. And the year that followed that was the darkest of my life. The darkest. Me, myself and I in the dark, literally every night, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And worse, I believed I’d brought a spirit back from Sri Lanka and that I had this spirit attached to me for months. I’d lie down and close my eyes and it felt like there was something breathing right next to me.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust people who say, “Oh, I never regret anything. Everything led me to this moment.” Wow. That is a failure of imagination. And there are so many things I regret. So many things I regret. Mostly I regret the things that I didn’t do rather than things that I did do. Because the changes that I implemented at the age of 21—what I did next after the darkest, shittiest experience of my life, followed by the darkest year of my life—were amazing. I look back on myself and I think, “Who is this crazy fool? And what a bloody ballsy bitch.”

Within a year of leaving the psychotic psychiatric hospital—the state mental institution—I was back overseas in Vietnam a year later, leading tours for the next two years. And it was kind of like jumping, you know, from the frying pan into the fire. It was, in retrospect, kind of a crazy thing to do—it’s like, “Get back on the horse, lady, get back on the horse.” And it was the best thing I could have done. And in fact, all the great things that I’ve done, all the ballsy, bold moves that I’ve made, I have done after I was broken, after I failed, after I got to a point where I thought, “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.”

So two babies under two. Yay. That was fun. What would I do differently? I would have invested way more money and, you know, in kindness and compassion to my younger self. My partner and I had a massive mortgage. We were desperately trying to pay down the mortgage. He was new to self-employment. I was still fairly new to self-employment. We were both just struggling to figure it out under an immense amount of stress and pressure. But if I had my time over, I would have spent more money. I would have invested in help. I would have invested in help with the babies.

I had a well-honed fantasy at the time of having a nanny who was in the other room with the babies whilst I was diligently working away and not have easy access to them, so I could hop over there and give them a cuddle and a kiss and a little tickle under the chin and then go back to the desk. I had terrible boundaries at the time, and this was really the period—the first period—where the business model was clearly broken and I needed to redefine it and I needed to implement some brave, ballsy changes, which I did, including better boundaries.

If I could write a letter to my younger self, I would tell myself to stop worrying quite so much. I wasted so much of my younger years, particularly in my twenties, lacking the confidence. And this is the funny thing about confidence: it’s easy to look at other people and go, “Ah, she’s confident, she’s ballsy.” And I think we all do it, right? But we’re all lacking in self-confidence. I’m sure my friends, when I was young, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, thought I was ballsy, and to an extent I was, but I was also way too self-conscious. I worried way too much about what other people thought about me. I overthought everything. When I started my business, I was way too easily intimidated. I forgot—I forgot how ballsy I was.

I forgot the fact that before I started my business at the ripe old age of 25 and 26, I was in meetings with the CEO of Electrolux. I was in meetings with directors of multinational organisations. I was holding my own in conversation. I wish that when I was younger I’d backed myself more and I’d backed myself way earlier than I have done. I should have.

If I could have taken bigger risks when ads first came out on Facebook in 2012—boosted posts were the first thing that came out. I spent $5 and I got a direct return of hundreds. I was selling a course at Byron Bay at the time, and I posted a pretty average-looking Facebook post. And not only did I get sales from that Facebook post, but I actually had a stranger call me. Can you imagine? If I had my time over, I would have borrowed as much money as I could get my hands on. And the people in business who were peers of mine at the time did exactly that. The people who have way larger businesses than I do did exactly that. They invested heavily in ads when ads brought an excellent return on investment, when it cost two or three cents to get a Facebook fan.

I wish I’d seen opportunities and acted a lot quicker because I do—I am good at spotting opportunities. I see opportunities early and I have wasted too much time overthinking things. And you know, one of the things that I’m kind of sitting with at the moment is AI. And AI, you know, when it first kind of started becoming a little bit more mainstream and everybody started talking about it, I was coaching a client at the time and she was heavily involved. She was an early adopter. She was in there with the Americans learning, you know, and she’d be teaching me, she’d be feeding me this information back. And I saw people who were opportunistic about it, and I’m not judging opportunism. I don’t think that’s a judgment. I think it’s great. I think it’s essential if you’re an entrepreneur.

I saw people act quickly and I’ve seen people in the last three years go from nowhere into, you know, huge, huge. And, you know, to an extent I’m still overthinking AI. And I think sometimes that’s appropriate. I think sometimes things are complex. They are a little bit complicated. They are nuanced. They are not straightforward. They are perhaps a storm in a teacup. Who knows? AI could be a storm in a teacup. Who am I to say? I honestly to goodness, hand on heart, don’t know enough, but there have been over the years other opportunities I’ve spotted where I have not backed myself. I have not taken the risk because I am in the enviable position of lifting the lid on other people’s businesses, of seeing behind the scenes of other people’s businesses over 14 years of business coaching and longer than that of, you know, digital marketing services.

And I know for a fact that the clients who take the big risks get the big payoffs. Now they oftentimes get, you know, backlash. They have failures, they lose money. Of course, of course, that goes with taking a bigger swing, but you’ve got to take the big swings if you’re going to get rewarded. And so as a letter to my younger self, it would be: take a bigger swing. Take a bigger swing. And especially—and I’m talking to you, I’m talking to you—if you know that honestly to goodness, you will never be destitute because this poverty mentality that so many of us carry is not based in fact. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is—sometimes it’s a person who does not have a safety net. They do not have a loving family. They do not have those things to fall back on. But there are many people, including myself, where if we were honest with ourselves, we are never going to be destitute. No matter how big of a swing, how big of a risk we take, there is a safety net for us to fall back on. And so that enduring poverty complex is a psychological hurdle. It is not reality.

If I could write a letter to my younger self, I would emphasise again and again and again and again and again to take your damn self-care and stress management seriously. You would have heard me say before: my mental health through my profit and loss statement. Your ability to manage stress—and not just manage stress, but thrive in stress, not just recuperate quickly, but thrive in stressful situations—because stress is part of life. It is not some big ogre to be avoided. You know, it’s not like a huge kind of thing that we just need to avoid at all costs.

One of my books that I love recommending, and I’ve gifted to many clients over the years, is The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal. It completely changed my attitude to stress. It’s not an ogre. And if you’re trying to avoid stress at all costs, then I dare say you are living a very small life. And we have got to take our self-care and stress management seriously. That is something I would absolutely say to my younger self. So much of stress is actually self-inflicted from our own psychology, but when it’s coming from external circumstances—very real external circumstances—we have to take our self-care seriously. We must. It has an indelible impact on ourselves.

If I’d known—if I’d actually believed when I was in my twenties—that hard exercise was actually one of the best things for my mental health. Oh God. Imagine what would be different. I cannot even imagine what would be different, but it took me till I was in my very late thirties before I finally discovered weightlifting, and that had a massive impact on my stress levels and on my mental health.

If I could write a letter to my younger self, I would tell myself to do more, not to do less. Not to avoid the likelihood of making a mistake because most mistakes aren’t really mistakes. They’re easily fixed. They’re not really failures. Most of the time it’s just a mismatch of expectations—having high expectations that things are going to turn out swimmingly, they turn out differently to what you expected, then you decide prematurely that somehow or another that means it’s a failure. Where we get these ideas, I mean, really, where we get these ideas. I want to shake us collectively.

I always regret the things that I didn’t do rather than the things that I did do. There are very few things really that I regret doing. Maybe a lot of those were interpersonal—when perhaps I was a little bit glib or, you know, the way I interacted with an individual was not fabulous because more than likely I was stressed and taking it out on them.

If I could write a letter to my younger self, it would be that I would forgive myself more quickly than I have. And you know, a lot of that relates to what I just said with interpersonal relationships, with conversations that I think, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t said that. I wish I’d apologised more readily. I wish I’d had that hard conversation with that person rather than just kind of letting them off the hook or letting both of us off the hook.”

And the very best thing that can happen—or not the very best thing—but if you have a failure and oftentimes I’m in the midst of something fucking up and I’m like, “This is going to be a great story.” And as a storyteller, I—that’s, you know, one of the things that I seek out in life. I want to be collecting great stories.

I have a picture of myself on my desk. I cannot remember where I got this idea from. Forgive me. It was some other smart person, but I’ve got a picture of myself at my desk. I’m three years old and I am wearing my swim costume as you do, and I’m on my back veranda in a little terrace in Paddington where I was born. And I’m standing in front of an old-fashioned blackboard with some chalk, and I’m smiling from ear to ear.

The reason that photo is on my desk is to remind myself about self-compassion because it’s very hard to take big risks when you are constantly criticising and critiquing yourself. It’s possible, but it’s not advisable. So this photo is a counter to that ongoing negative narrative, that broken negative bias—that broken piece of our brain that has a bias always towards the negative, the self-criticism, the self-loathing, the overthinking that we are all privy to.

That picture of myself on my desk reminds me that if I am absolutely, you know, mean and hurtful and harsh and duly harsh with myself—more harsh than I would be with anybody else in my life—that this is the young child that I’m criticising.

So this is my challenge to you: Go into the forest, lie on the moss, write yourself a letter to your younger self, forgive yourself, take a bigger swing. I don’t want to be on my deathbed and have regrets about things I didn’t do. Get a photo of yourself—get a picture when you were a cute, gorgeous child—and put it on your desk and look at it. And remember, the next time you go to criticise or critique or overthink or overanalyse what you’ve done, and more than likely what you haven’t yet done, because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die with any regrets.

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or is having you change the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.