What I’d Want My Younger Self to Know

(Hint: Great Advice for Any Age)

by Jessica

One of the most illuminating questions we’ve asked the women of the Pro-age Revolution is, “If you could go back to your 24-year-old self and give her one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Their answers have been so beautiful and inspiring, and they are showing how we gain so much amazing insight, perspective, and joy as we age.

So much of their advice was about happiness and gratitude and feeling good. It’s really been making me reflect on how much more I know about pleasure and happiness now that I’ve got a few decades on my younger self.

Happiness and feeling good on the inside are what make a woman look great on the outside. As our women of the Pro-age Revolution are showing us—that ability to feel good on the inside only expands as we get older.

Here are a few of those pieces of advice that are really sticking with us...

Life is too short to be worrying about the future.

Many different women echoed this same idea. Each woman had a different way of expressing it:

“Don’t worry so much!”

“Don’t feel you have to make everything happen right away.”

“Life is going to unfold in exactly the right way, you don’t have to do it perfectly.”

But it all comes down to the idea that: It’s all going to be okay.

Even women who have gone through really tough stuff as they got older developed the strength and resiliency to not only endure those harsh times, but to evolve, grow and learn from them.

So many of us wish we could go back in time and tell our younger selves not to worry so much about what will happen—to just let life unfold.

And the great thing about that? It’s still true. When I catch myself worrying about the decades ahead, now I have enough experience behind me to remind myself that I didn’t need to worry then—so I don’t need to worry now, either.

There’s no “perfect time” for anything.

I noticed that many women admitted they kept themselves on a really specific—and unforgiving—clock when they were younger.

By such-and-such age, they thought they had to be at some particular point in their career, or be making a certain amount of money, or be married, or have kids, or own a house.

And most women’s lives didn’t unfold “on schedule”—at all. They told us how perfect life’s timing turned out to be, and if they could have trusted that when they were younger, they would have had a lot more room for relaxation, fun, and pleasure.

I remind myself of this one every day.

There’s no clock we’re supposed to be on, no schedule our lives have to match.

Everything happens at exactly the right time for us, and everyone’s version of “perfect timing” is different.

You are already so beautiful—just the way you are.

Almost every woman we spoke to talked about how stressed out they’d been in her 20s about fitting society’s beauty ideals.

Most of us spent a lot of time that decade worrying about whether we were thin enough, curvy enough, “pretty” enough, whether we fit the mold—and what that would mean for how our lives unfolded.

Without exception, all the women we interviewed told us that not only did they recognize their own unique beauty a bit later in life—but they looked back on their younger, insecure, worried selves and saw just how beautiful they always were.

Society’s myths about how we’re “supposed to look” to be beautiful are just that—myths. The older we get, the more time we have to practice shaking off those myths and recognizing what’s really true for us—including the fact that we are already beautiful.

What piece of advice would you give your 24-year-old self? Let us know in the comments below!