Inspiration - I Believe we Change

 Inspiration -  I Believe we Change

By Nikki Viljoen of Viljoen Consulting (Pty) Ltd

It is said that “we don’t have to change friends if we understand that friends change.”

Well in my book, so do we.  We change!  We grow and move forward.  Sometimes we stop dead in our tracks and need to be kick-started to get going again and sometimes something happens and we even go back wards.  

Think about it for a moment.  As children we learn and as we learn we grow – both physically and emotionally.  What was really important to us as children growing up is usually nothing that we get up tight about as teenagers.  Our understanding of our immediate environment and the people in it change as we grow.

Then as teenagers, the hormones kick in and we swing like a great big pendulum, going from ecstatic highs to dangerous lows, very seldom spending any length of time, balanced, somewhere in the middle.

Once the hormones settle down and we become more emotionally stable and enter young adulthood, what seemed like a ‘life and death’ situation as a teenager usually becomes nothing more than a slight embarrassment as we think back to what we were so ready to give our very lives for – presuming of course that we can actually remember the incident at all!

Then as adults we grow as we experience day to day life and the trials and tribulations that we set up for ourselves.  From each experience we learn (hopefully) and we grow.  

As we grow we change, hopefully for the better, and we morph into who and what it is that we want to become.  

Friendships that were forged in our youth often do not survive to adulthood and this is because as individuals, we grow at different speeds, and often in different directions.

We expect others around us, our family, our friends and colleagues to accept us for what and whom we are, at any given moment in our lives and yet there appears to be this problem that we have in seeing and accepting the changes that our friends, family and colleagues have also gone through to become what they are.

We all change, whether it is for the better or for the worse – it is entirely up to us.  Let us embrace that change both in ourselves and in our friends.  Let us accept the changes in both ourselves and in our friends.  Let us be all that we can be and accept our friends just as they are.

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or www.viljoenconsulting.co.za