What do you want to be when you grow up?
What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
May 28, 2025
It’s a question we were all asked as kids. Sometimes with hope. Sometimes with pressure. Sometimes with no real answer at all.
I’ve been thinking about how this question reappears in adulthood — not from others, but from ourselves. And the truth is, many of us don’t know. Or worse, we did know… and now we’re not so sure.
We may have stepped into careers we chose when we were twenty — guided by ambition, survival, or the illusion of certainty. Some of us simply stayed where we landed — maybe following a parent’s path or walking through a door that opened without much thought. Others pursued passions that, somewhere along the way, stopped feeling like ours.
And now, here we are — years later — noticing a quiet discontent. Maybe our passion job is shifting with AI or being swallowed up by a younger generation - so we are in fear. Maybe the spark is gone that once was. Maybe we feel stuck — financially, logistically, emotionally — with no clear Plan B. Maybe the financial reward isn’t living up to our expectations. At the basis is discontent and/ or fear.
I am truthfully in awe about how this new generation are changing the script: Living in new countries, not doing what is expected of them, working remotely, following their desires now - rather than waiting until retirement.
Regardless where you sit with this idea of what you want to be next or who you want to be when you grow up….
It’s not just about work. It’s about meaning. Identity. Control.
The spiral can feel overwhelming:
I should be grateful…
I chose this…
It’s too late to change…
I can’t afford to start over…
Underneath all of that is something even deeper: the old, unhealed stories that shaped how we think about purpose, permission, and possibility.
If you’re here — in this place of questioning, regret, restlessness — know this: it’s not a failure. It’s a signal. A reminder that your past choices don’t own your future. That your identity isn’t static. That there is a story underneath this one, waiting to be revisited, reframed, and rewritten.
You don’t need to know the final answer right now. But you do get to ask the question again.
What do you want to be — now, here, as your grown self — if no one else was watching?
Maybe that’s where your real becoming begins.
THIS is one of the gifts of age….wisdom of coming into this.
Book a complimentary consult and I’ll explain how you can stir up these thoughts to align them with your beliefs and gain a sense of excitement rather than fear around these dreams and changes we all go through.
Jennifer Ross
RTT Practitioner | Founder, Jennifer Mary Ross LLC
www.jennifermaryross.com
