22 Life Lessons I learnt in my 20s

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When you open yourself to learning, you learn something new every day. I have put together a list of 22 lessons I learnt in my 20s that changed my way of experiencing life for the better.

1. Invest in yourself — Spend your time and energy into building your personal proficiency, skills, thinking capabilities and emotional capabilities and professional capacity building.
2. Build healthy habits — Habits make you who you are, so invest in building healthy habits that will anchor you in a state of wellbeing, personal effectiveness, work ethics and give you a strong foundation/base to build upon
3. Follow your dreams — Work towards your goals and dreams, choose the path that you are passionate about, find what is ideal for you and pursue it each day. You do not have to follow the crowd.
4. Be a student of life — When you have a learning/growth mindset, you will easily learn from those around you or the experiences you are having. Seek out the learnings and implement it for yourself. Be ruthless about learning and growing.
5. Be brave — Make choices that will need you to get outside your comfort zone, face your fears head-on, don’t let the fear of failing stop you from trying something.
6. Befriend change — Change is truly the only constant that exists, befriend it, rewire your brain to get excited by change. Agility is paramount in your ability to make every challenge an opportunity and to really explore life and expand yourself.
7. Spend time with yourself — Travel alone, live by yourself, be your own best friend. Invest time in understanding yourself more, why you do what you do, give yourself permission to redefine yourself as many times as you choose to and stay authentic to yourself. Treat yourself the way you would treat your best friend.
8. Be kind and compassionate — The only way to be is to be kind. We will never know what the other person is going through and as a human, it is our primary responsibility to be humane to all living beings. Be a safe space for those around you.
9. Find your tribe — Find your tribe and once you do, make time for them, they are connections that will last a lifetime. They would go to war along with you, you will always have each other’s back and be each other’s cheerleaders. Experience unconditional acceptance and trust with them, they are family.
10. You are responsible for your own healing and growth — Take care of your inner child, address any part of yourself that is holding you back. You cannot change what has happened to you in your childhood but you are the only one who can define your life as an adult. Take ownership of your own healing as you need to heal to grow.
11. Give back to the world — Volunteer your time, energy, skills towards a cause that you’re passionate about, work towards something larger than yourself. Every act of service counts, it makes a difference.
12. Strengthen your relationship with your family — Invest time in building your relationship with your parents and siblings as the individual you are today. Give them a chance to get to know you authentically and deepen the connection.
13. Get comfortable with saying sorry and thank you — Especially with those closest to you. Accept when you are wrong, apologize and repair. Say thank you more often
14. Take chances — That is the only way to learn, every field expert started at zero. Try new things, take chances and get comfortable with failing. What matters is that you learn from them and be persistent.
15. Invest in the cause and not the effect — To see a different outcome, you have to do things differently. Be ready for iterations, trying out different strategies and then you will see changes in the effect.
16. Learn financial management — Learn to manage your finances, implement budgeting, saving and investing. Start small, explore and learn from them.
17. Ask for help — Learn to ask for help as soon as you realize you need it, it is brave to seek help and someone will always be there but you need to ask first.
18. Stop labelling yourself or others — Do not box anyone, most people are evolving, make space for yourself and others to change and grow and accept them for who they are today.
19. Have fun — Don’t take yourself too seriously. Enjoy yourself, pursue your interests and hobbies, do things that make you laugh, give yourself permission to have fun. Learn to laugh at yourself too. Know that things will work out.
20. Be grateful — There is much to be grateful in life, focus on those aspects and draw strength from it. Express gratitude more often.
21. Give trust and love — Give yourself permission to give and receive trust and love. We are all worthy of it and almost always, people honour it. We are beings of connectedness, experience it and enjoy it.

And one for the road,

Believe in yourself — you are worthy of love, trust and wellbeing. Yes, we are all work in progress but at every stage of this progress, we are good enough.