What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
If I were asked to give one piece of advice to someone younger than me, I would begin with this: growing older does not simply mean that your age has increased. Growing up also means understanding yourself better.
Sometimes, we say that we have reached a certain age and that we are now adults. But perhaps we should also ask ourselves whether we have really understood ourselves as we have grown older. Do we understand our decisions, our feelings, our desires, and our dreams?
For me, age is less important than how well we understand ourselves.
Listen to Your Own Voice Before Listening to Others
Before listening to or accepting someone else’s advice, I think it is important to ask yourself what you are saying to yourself.
Are you listening to your own voice?
There will always be people in our lives who give us advice. Someone will tell us what we should do, someone will tell us what they think is right for us, and someone may question our decisions. Listening to them is not wrong. We can learn a lot from other people’s experiences.
But the problem begins when we become so busy listening to everyone else’s voice that we stop listening to our own.
How Do We End Up Hurting Ourselves?
From what I have seen and experienced so far, there is one thing that has changed the way I look at life.
We often give other people’s opinions more importance than our own.
We think about what someone said about us, what people will think about our decisions, and whether our family or society will accept our choices.
But sometimes, we forget to ask ourselves what we are doing to ourselves.
This is why we sometimes end up hurting ourselves. We suppress what we want, ignore our own voice, and put our dreams aside.
And the strange thing is that the person we may be hurting the most is not someone else.
It is ourselves.
Other People’s Advice Matters, But So Does Your Own Voice
This does not mean that we should completely ignore what other people say.
Advice from others can be valuable. Someone may have more experience than us or may notice something that we cannot see at that moment.
But when we feel that, in a particular situation, our own advice matters most to us, we should listen to ourselves too.
Not every decision can be made according to someone else’s preference.
There are decisions whose consequences we have to live with ourselves. That is why completely silencing our own voice may not always be the right thing to do.
Understand Yourself Before Becoming Part of the Crowd
There is always a crowd around us.
We see what other people are doing, which paths they are choosing, and what kind of lives they are living. Sometimes, following the same path simply because everyone else is doing it feels easier.
But everyone’s life is different.
So do not choose a path simply because everyone else is walking on it.
Give yourself time.
Just as we spend time with another person, listen to them, and try to understand them, we should spend some time with ourselves every day.
Perhaps, with time, you will meet the person who can become the closest person in your life—
yourself.
Do Not Let Other People’s Doubts Become Your Own
Sometimes, people may doubt us so much that we begin to doubt our own decisions.
They may question our dreams. They may question our choices. They may tell us that the path we have chosen is wrong.
And honestly, when that happens, we may also begin to doubt ourselves.
It is not that we will never feel afraid or confused. We are human, after all.
But what matters is not allowing that doubt to completely take over.
If you have tried to understand yourself, thought carefully about your decision, and have a reason for choosing your path, do not stop believing in yourself simply because someone else doubts you.
Learn to Trust Yourself
Trusting yourself does not mean believing that you will always be right.
We can be wrong.
Our decisions can be wrong. Our dreams can change. We may even have to change direction several times along the way.
But making a mistake does not mean that we should stop believing in ourselves.
Sometimes, trusting yourself simply means that when the whole world is speaking louder than your own voice, you do not allow that voice to disappear completely.
Why Is Listening to Yourself Important Today?
Today, we live in a world where everyone seems to have an opinion about almost everything.
Social media tells us how we should look, what we should achieve, and how we should live. Society has its expectations, and our families have their own concerns.
In the middle of all this, listening to ourselves can become difficult.
Perhaps that is exactly why spending time with ourselves and understanding who we are has become even more important.
When we begin to understand ourselves, we may be able to live our lives without being completely controlled by other people’s opinions.
And perhaps this is where we find something that can be more important than success—
peace with the life we are living.
If I had to leave someone younger than me with just one thought, it would be this:
Listen to others. Learn from them. But never let your own voice become so small that you can no longer hear it.
Growing older does not automatically mean growing up.
Perhaps growing up begins when we start understanding ourselves, listening to our own voice, and taking responsibility for the choices we make in our lives.
Because we do not need to be close to everyone in this world.
But being close to ourselves may be one of the most important things of all.