Hi there! “I feel behind. I’m in my mid-thirties and have no savings. My friends around me have more money than me and my family (which I would love for myself) and I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything. I’ve spent the last ten years hustling in my nursing career (trying to pay off my student loans) and have been getting burnt out every couple of years, so I go traveling around the world… then run out of money and have to come back to work! Please help me be more “adult-like”. Thanks for keeping people healthy and supporting people’s healing! I’m sure you’ve helped hundreds, if not thousands, of people heal over the last ten years. Sounds like an awesome achievement! With all that you give to others, it’s no wonder you have felt the desire to take time off for yourself. A few questions to ask yourself when you’re feeling behind: This money that your other friends have, is that just fancy cars and nice houses, or have you actually seen their bank account? How do you know these friends don’t have mountains of debt they don’t tell you about? Do they envy the freedom you have while they are dealing with taking the kids to school again and again? The grass isn’t always greener! I’m sure you have a lot of student debt from your schooling, which can be crushing. On the flip side, though, this has been a big blessing, and your career is very thankful! Have these friends traveled to as many countries as you? Have they hiked to the places, met the people, seen the sunsets over foreign exotic lands, and eaten the foods you have? When you say “behind”, I’m curious if you can also see that you are ahead too? You have an abundance of life experience and an amazing career. Your life experience has no doubt translated into wisdom, maturity, compassion, and empathy more than many others have to count for themselves. These can all be used as tools to get “ahead” as you desire. The trap of perception and societal expectations When you tell yourself you are “behind,” you are actually stepping into a loop that creates a cycle in which you are constantly chasing something that feels out of reach. Because you are constantly looking backward and thinking about what you could’ve done differently and comparing yourself to others, you never feel truly free in the present. In reality, nobody is behind, but everyone has their own unique journey. The societal idea that you need to achieve specific milestones by a certain age doesn’t fit the reality experienced by many of us. So you shouldn’t let that societal pressure weigh you down, but trust that you will get where you want to be at your own pace. Your pattern of working hard and then needing to travel shows you something very important: that you feel trapped by your current circumstances and you seek freedom. Recognizing this is the first step to help you overcome feeling behind. The irony is that by traveling and spending all your money when you come back home, you feel even worse, and the cycle keeps going endlessly. So perhaps the key is to find ways to feel free in your day-to-day life so you don’t feel the need to escape so often. Finding freedom in everyday experiences That feeling of freedom that you are chasing usually comes when you feel joy. Joy is something we are all chasing but unfortunately feels more and more out of reach as we age. So a good idea would be to incorporate more spontaneous but low-cost experiences in your life: By following that joyous feeling, you’re not only having fun but also learning more about yourself and creating space for new opportunities to come into your life. A happy person is naturally more magnetic to everyone around them, and you never know when the right person might notice you and what opportunities might arise. Rewiring your brain for abundance There is a beautiful connection between your mindset and your reality. When you feel good, it is as if the world responds back to you and you become much more prone to noticing and taking advantage of new opportunities. This isn’t just wishful thinking; there is actual science behind it. Our brains possess incredible neuroplasticity and research suggests that the same areas of the brain light up when we vividly imagine an experience as when we are actually living it. By intentionally imagining positive outcomes, you are helping your brain rewire to recognize and gravitate toward those positive outcomes in the real world. This mindset shift can be one of the biggest helpers in overcoming feeling behind. Taking control of your momentum Have you maximized every opportunity with your qualifications to get more money from your career (without working too much harder)? If you’re working hard and then disappearing to travel, maybe consider balancing yourself out? Can you take shorter trips more often to still have the self-care you desire without spending too much money and without taking too much time away from work? From here, as you adjust the dials and knobs in your life more subtly, you will find the sweet spot to stay ahead with the areas you are already ahead and get ahead in other ways. Like with saving the money that you desire and paying off the debts. From here the money equation is quite simple. Automate savings into a separate account each week and automate a few dollars extra into one of your loans to chip away at the principal balance. The amount will be whatever is the maximum you can afford before you start to get uncomfortable with the thought of putting more. You won’t miss it as much as you think and if you’re feeling like pushing yourself, put a few more dollars in, as this will help you stretch. It will also help with life balance and keeping a
We’ve Taught Kids to Say “I Don’t Know” — And That’s the Real Problem
Ask a room full of five-year-old what they want to be when they grow up. You’ll get astronauts. Dragon tamers. Professional pizza testers. Kids who want to be dogs. The answers will be loud, specific, and completely unfiltered by reality. Every single hand goes up. Ask the same question to a room full of teenagers. Silence. Shrugged shoulders. A lot of “I don’t know.” Something happened in between. And it wasn’t just growing up. “I Don’t Know” Isn’t Ignorance. It’s Armor. I work with a lot of kids. Coach them through all kinds of stuff — performance, mindset, figuring out who they are and what they actually want from their lives. And the phrase I hear more than any other? I don’t know. At first, it sounds like confusion. Like they genuinely haven’t thought about it. But the longer I do this work, the more I’ve come to understand what “I don’t know” actually means when a kid says it. It means: I’ve learned that having an answer is risky. It means: The last time I said what I really thought, it didn’t go well. It means: This is the safest thing I can say right now. “I don’t know” isn’t ignorance. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s what you say when you’ve been told — directly or indirectly, once or a thousand times — that your real answer isn’t welcome here. How Curiosity Gets Coached Out of Kids Nobody sits a child down and says “stop caring about things.” It doesn’t work like that. It happens slowly. Quietly. Through a thousand small moments that add up to one loud message. It’s the passion project that got laughed at. The dream that got called unrealistic. The genuine answer that was met with an eye roll, a redirect, or a “that’s not practical.” It’s years of school systems that reward the right answer over the honest one. Years of being graded on performance instead of curiosity. Years of learning that the goal isn’t to discover what you think — it’s to figure out what the room wants to hear. By the time most kids are teenagers, they’ve become experts at reading the room. They know how to give you the answer that ends the conversation without costing them anything. And “I don’t know” ends the conversation every time. The Deeper Problem: Disconnection Here’s what worries me most about this pattern. It’s not just that kids don’t know what they want to do with their lives. That’s normal. That’s actually fine. Nobody at sixteen should have it all figured out. What worries me is that so many of them have lost the ability to connect — with themselves, with the people around them, with anything that asks them to be honest about who they are. They can’t tell you what they like because they’ve spent years suppressing the process of noticing what they like. They can’t tell you what excites them because excitement became something to be managed and hidden, not expressed. They can’t connect with their parents or peers in any real way because real connection requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires knowing yourself well enough to show up honestly. When you smush curiosity out of a kid long enough, you don’t just take away their hobbies. You take away their compass. And a person without a compass doesn’t go somewhere wrong. They just stop going anywhere at all. What We Can Do Differently The good news is that curiosity doesn’t die. It goes underground. In almost every kid I’ve worked with who leads with “I don’t know,” there’s something underneath that answer. A thing they light up about when the pressure is off. A topic they’ll talk about for twenty minutes if you catch them off guard. A moment where their face changes before they can stop it. The work isn’t to give them answers. It’s to make it safe to have them again. That starts with a few simple shifts: Ask better questions. Instead of “what do you want to be?” try “what’s something you’d do even if nobody was watching?” Instead of “what are you good at?” try “what’s something you could talk about for an hour without getting bored?” Smaller questions, lower stakes, more honest answers. Celebrate the noticing. When a kid expresses a preference — any preference, even a small one — treat it like it matters. Because it does. Every “I kind of like this” is a thread. Pull it gently. Stop rushing them toward conclusions. The goal isn’t to get them to declare a major at sixteen. The goal is to help them stay curious long enough to find out what’s worth being curious about. Give them permission to explore without a destination. Model honesty yourself. Kids learn disconnection from adults who are disconnected. If you want them to say what they actually think, let them see you do it first. Admit when you don’t know. Share what you’re still figuring out. Make “I’m not sure yet” sound like wisdom instead of weakness. Curiosity Is a Skill — And It Can Be Rebuilt I’ve watched kids who came in with nothing but shrugged shoulders start to find their edges again. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes consistency, patience, and a lot of questions that don’t have wrong answers. But it happens. Because here’s the truth: those kids who say “I don’t know” all the time? They do know. Somewhere underneath all the armor and the conditioning and the years of being redirected — they know exactly what moves them. They just stopped trusting that it was safe to say so. Our job — as coaches, parents, teachers, mentors, anyone who works with young people — isn’t to give them a path. It’s to help them trust themselves enough to find one. The curiosity was always there. We just have to stop beating it out of them. Most people sleepwalk past their own instincts. They dismiss the warmth they feel around certain work as nostalgia or
