I’m 40. If You’re in Your 20s or 30s, WATCH THIS

Hey family, it's your girl and welcome back to the channel. Y'all, we need to have a talk. You know that moment when you sit back and reflect on everything that the older people in your life have told you and you actually have to admit the things they were saying was true, even if you didn't like to hear it. I've been in that era and as a licensed psychologist who's been through it all, building a career, a family, everything in between, I'm here to spill the green tea on the things that I've learned. Now, if you're in your twenties, thirties or beyond and you thinking, Dr. Nina, I still got time. That's exactly why you need to be watching this video. Besides spending a lot of years studying the human mind, I've learned a lot of things the hard way so you don't have to. So today I'm giving you the cheat codes that I wish someone had given me. And before you ask, this isn't just a live, laugh, love moment. This is real talk from someone who has the credentials and the life experience to back it up. So grab your notebook, get comfortable and let's make these next few minutes change the next 40 years of your life and beyond. And you're going to want to watch till the end cause this might blow your mind and change your whole life. Comment down below and let me know what resonates with you. Y'all, we're trying to get back in the algorithm and it's absolutely free to subscribe and comment and check out my LTK and Amazon storefront for any items that I mentioned today. Are you sure that your goals are actually for you? Many of us are still climbing mountains that others chose for us. The view from the wrong summit will not satisfy your soul. You can't live someone else's dream. I used to try to satisfy everyone. You know, if someone had an input or a thought process, I wanted to show them how I was enacting on a plan that they had for me. But what that did was that let me empty and it also left me wasting time. As a young person, I learned the psychology of authentic goal setting, figuring out what made my heart smile. I prayed about it. I read about it. I researched, I figured out a plan and the more and more you have a goal, even if it's slowly reached, you'll feel more secure in the plans that you have. You have to remember that nobody can live this life for you. At the end of it, you're very responsible for it. We can say that other people waste our time, but when people give us advice, it's up to us to take the meat and leave the bones. And the way that you do that is think about your value set, what's important to you, but also pair and match that with people who care about you and the things they say to you. It doesn't always mean that those two things align. Consider your goals first. Stop playing games with your health and blaming other people for it. Your body is really your only permanent address. That was why I lost over 100 pounds and kept it off for those 20 years. And now back on a journey after having a child, I couldn't blame anybody for my downfall. Yes, I didn't know everything about health, but it was my responsibility to learn and to change the trajectory of where I was headed. Your health is your wealth. You can have as much money in the world, but if mentally, spiritually and physically you are not sound, everything will be off in your life. You see, it wasn't until I learned about keeping my health together, which was mainly because I was adopted and I didn't want to find out the hard way that I had other issues. It wasn't until I aligned that that I learned discipline, investing in myself, feeling better about the sacrifices that I make and setting boundaries. You may not see it that way right now, but a lot of times the things that you have to do in a health journey, whether it be physical, mental or spiritual or emotional, you're going to learn how to enact that across other parts of your life. When you do things that make you proud of the temple that you have, you're not going to be so quick to let others abuse it or take advantage. So stop playing games and do the things that are necessary to help you feel your best. Your self confidence will thank you for it. It's important to take the wheel of your own life. It's easy to wait on the trends on Tik Tok or on YouTube or other places to tell you what you should want in this life. But it takes a lot more core work to not worry so much about what everyone externally has to say about you, but what you really believe about yourself and what you deserve in this life. A lot of times the choices that we make about our lives are because of what we believe we deserve. At one point in my life I didn't believe I deserved much and it reflected in the people I chose to be around. It wasn't until I grew, set boundaries, stopped looking at trends and thinking about how I felt within and wanted to fix that so that it reflected out. I had to take responsibility for time that I did waste in certain situations. Okay, this is me being real vulnerable, but even in a relationship before where someone had cheated on me and I decided that at one point and I was in my twenties, you know, maybe we can work this out. Maybe we can do this. And we were trying and it wasn't working out. And I remember thinking to myself, do I want to deal with this for the rest of my life? I'm too young for this. We having these kinds of problems and we just now getting started and I have to take responsibility without taking blame in that situation. No, I wasn't the one who cheated or caused the issue, but sticking around a little longer than my welcome, I can take responsibility for, but it takes a bigger person to think I don't deserve this and I deserve more and I don't care what people think I should have. I deserve better treatment, a sound mind and peace in my space and sometimes that's hard for us to grasp or own up to. And that's where therapy came in for me young. I've been in therapy since my teens, but consistently since my twenties and if you're having problems sorting these types of things out or even other issues, that's where better help comes in. And they're the sponsor of today's video. They're on a mission to make starting therapy easier. Their platform is where therapists and clients can communicate effectively and get the most out of therapy. This makes working with a professional more accessible. I was so surprised to find that they have a journal inside the platform for personal reflection. There's group sessions with a number of different topics every day and they make it so easy to get started. Y'all fill out the questionnaire and you'll get matched with a therapist in as little as a couple of days. And they also help you to have control in your own process. If you don't feel like your therapist is the right fit, you can switch to another one until you find someone that you truly connect with. They carefully make sure that therapists on their platform are well qualified and their customer support team is there to help you if you have any questions and I mean anything. So if you're struggling and you think you would benefit from a therapy session, click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com forward slash Dr Nina and get 10% off your first month of therapy. Choose your forever person like a lifetime prescription. It's so much more than having a list of do's and don'ts, wills and won'ts, red flags or never decorations. And I can speak from my own purview. I didn't meet my husband until I was almost 35 years old. In fact, I was three weeks from being 35 and you got to know around that time so many people were talking about being the old hag and not having kids, not being married yet, something's wrong with you. But what I had to realize was this, a lot of those people had rushed into things and they were left with the remnants of those things. I had made it to 35 and not that there's anything wrong with having failures because I have plenty of friends that have had divorces and other things, but I was determined to make it through life and if I wasn't going to be with the right person, then I was going to be by myself. If you built 35 years of good security, good career, good life, taking good care of yourself and living well, why would you sacrifice that just for a warm body? You might as well have a zombie. I'm so grateful for my husband because we have similar values. That was something I desired and I had put into my mind that if it wasn't going to happen with the right person, it wasn't going to just happen with anyone. You got to know that there were suitors before that, but they weren't right for me and that's okay. Learning that chemistry is not character or compatibility has been one of the biggest lifesavers in my life to date. Just because you get butterflies doesn't mean the person is for you. It might be your danger signals going off. I learned that everything I thought about the fairy tale and soulmates wasn't true. I desired a partnership and building a partnership takes time. Respect for the other person, respect for life goals, and also weathering the storms together. And now that I have my little family, I'm so grateful. It's been intentional from beginning to end and my husband and I have a connection and a bond that is different from just having a fiery soulmate. We're a partner compatible and truly loving and that's what counts. Seasons change and baby, so will you. Even in your twenties to thirties, you will find so many different things that change about you. Think about right now, if you're 25 years old, 10 years ago at 15, you were probably still playing with dolls or video games. Not to say that those are just a reserve for teenagers, but if you're now grown up thinking about jobs or just graduating from college or even just working a job or doing other things, your interest, your goals, your beliefs, the things that you want all change. This past weekend, we celebrated my baby's one year birthday. And one thing that I said is I don't even remember what I was doing over a year ago. My life, my goals, my day to day has completely changed. When you transition, there's beauty in that. Sometimes there's missteps, there's failures, but also it gives you a chance to realize that your previous knowledge can help you in your future and that helps you to be more adaptable. So when seasons change and problems come like this past year, having a tree fall on our house during a hurricane, I'm able to take a lot of the things that I've learned in the past, though they weren't the same in order to impact what I'm doing in the future. I'm able to respond differently to certain situations or hardships, but I'm also able to make plans that increase the chances that I'll be more successful in the future. This helps you to thrive and grow through change and have something to look back at, to realize how far you've come. It's important to turn trauma into triumph. Post-traumatic growth is real, but it's literally a situation that happens in your life or multiple situations that teach you how to make positive psychological changes. Sometimes horrible things happen in our lives, but a lot of times we have to take our power back by looking at that situation, learning from it and growing with it. Like I told y'all before, I almost flunked out of college. I had a 0.89 GPA in the first year of one of my semesters, and I tell you, it almost took me out. What I had to do was learn what I didn't do. Again, taking responsibility for my steps and realizing what I could do better in order to reroute the situation. I'm also adopted, so being adopted for some people is very traumatic, but I see it as a big, wonderful thing for me. Not everyone that's important in your life is going to be the people that are blood related. My adoptive mother didn't have to do it, but she took me in and treated me like royalty. That doesn't happen for everyone, but I also was able to take that and realize that rejection is not always your fault. And I've learned that in life because it's helped me to heal from everything, including job opportunity losses, friendships ending, and even breakups. And while others don't always take rejection well, I've learned how to take it, focus on me and anything that I find that I want to work on in order for me to excel, to get to my ultimate goal. Bad things happen to good people. That doesn't mean that you don't have to continue on the road of good. And that helps you to build resilience through adversity and help you figure out how to heal rather than numb or conceal how you actually feel. Growing pains are no fun. And I'm sure the caterpillar thought that before it became a butterfly. Woo child. Not everyone is going to like you and that's okay. Rejection is often protection. There is a big freedom in being disliked or even misunderstood. I remember at a time in my life, I felt like I didn't have real friends and you know, everything wasn't aligning the way that I thought it should have. A lot of that was not all completely true. I had to realign who I was dedicating my time to. Sometimes we don't see the people who are truly there for us because we're clouded by the people we want things to work out with. When in essence, everything is showing us that we do not need to pursue those relationships. I can remember at a point in my life, not doing my own thing and trying to fit in and that just never worked for me. First of all, it doesn't bring authentic people into your space. It makes you feel uncomfortable and it also makes you feel ashamed for who you really are. The friends that I have now, we will actually fly to each other to sit in a room completely quiet doing nothing. Just being in their presence makes me feel better. Just me being in their space at times helps them to feel alive. We don't always have to be distracted by clubs or night scenes or other things in order to get along. And it was written all over the wall because once those things stopped in my life, a lot of those friends that came with those scenes also stopped. The same is true of trauma bonding. Sometimes those friends we have, it's only because we complain to each other. And then once the complaint stops or one of your life's changes, you no longer have anything in common. Some people are only there for a time and not a lifetime. Your vibe will always attract your tribe, but reach for your own stability and the people that are truly supposed to be there will be. Take advice from winners because I find that especially in this age of social media, we love taking advice from losers. And that's why it's important to choose your mentors wisely. My mentors were always people connected to the things that I wanted and the things that I knew that I needed for my life to be successful. And I love to learn from people with lived experience. Before I was married, I spent a lot of time and still do with women who have been married for 40, 50 years and in successful, good, equal marriages. I also learned about marriages that weren't so good. They didn't want me to make the same mistakes that they had. Not people selling themselves as role models or slanging courses. I'm talking about people that I could actually verify had lived the life that I wanted or that I could seek information from. And through that, I've been able to take that and to give information to others to help them to build success. In the past, a lot of people used to be very, very quiet and mum's word about their own experiences. But I think it's time out for that. Not saying that you have to expose all your business because I don't. However, there's a lot of things in life that other people can avoid by hearing about your story, by hearing about your struggles and also to see themselves in you. So use that guidance and positive influence in order to impact others in a major way. The best paths do not come with a GPS. Over my lifetime, I've had to learn how to embrace uncertainty. I've been asked several times, how was it so easy for me to jump States and to pursue my dreams? It hasn't always been easy. I've had to really invest in my faith and it doesn't mean that my faith is always there. It comes and it goes and I've had to work on it over the course of my life by finding opportunities in the unknown and giving myself the chance to not only fail, but to thrive in certain situations has made me more secure in my decision making. So when I decided to pick up and move to Oklahoma in order to go to grad school, I realized that I didn't know anybody in the state of Oklahoma, but I moved there and made multiple connections with lifetime benefits. And by doing that, going there and thriving, I learned that I do make good decisions. Even when those decisions don't always seem clear to other people or myself, building confidence across your life can help you in other areas of your life. If you've remained disciplined in your health or your career path, a lot of times you will learn to understand discipline in other parts of your life and you'll have even more joy in creating your own path. Don't hang your joy on someone else's hook. It's important for you to have internal validation and realize that you have to be the last determiner of whether or not you're successful, whether or not you've made the decisions or if you have the right people in your life. And this takes building emotional independence. I feel like most of us at some point in our lives have been codependent or have experienced what codependency feels like. I've been in relationships where it was dependent upon their attitude, their thought process, how they were acting after work or when we were together on how the rest of my day went. What I had to realize is that the stuff that other people carry is not mine to bear. We have to be able to take ownership of our own happiness and until then we won't even know what that means for us. So this could even be a coworker like going into work and because someone's behavior is a certain way or their attitude is a certain way, it shifts your whole work day. You have to be willing to take responsibility for your own happiness, not their grouchiness. Maintaining your peace is your own work. No one should be described as being your peace. You are in control of what's peace for you and you are also in control of your own body and autonomy. If you need to move away from a situation because it's giving you grief, make a plan to do so even if you cannot do it immediately, but you cannot blame other people for taking away your peace. That rests with you. It's important to stop buying status. I had to realize this too when I got a little change in my pocket. Okay, it's wonderful to go out, have a shopping spree and do all these things, but you'll still be left empty. It's better to be wealthy than to appear wealthy. Always give back to yourself in ways that are unconventional. Your health is something that you need to be giving back to. Investing money into a 401k or a high yield savings or even a savings account, having a good checkings and emergency account. Those are things that will help you in the future. Not that cute bag that you just bought. Now it's nice to get a bag every now and again, but you definitely want to make sure that you're secure. Security helps you to build wealth. There's a psychology to status anxiety. A lot of times we think we have to be a certain way or appear a certain way so other people are impressed by us, but remember you're the only person that has to go to bed with yourself at night. So what if people think you're wealthy, but your bank account is completely broke and you can't even afford to pay your bills? Which one is worse? So consider not buying your status, but rather investing in yourself in ways that makes you more successful in the future. I had to learn to stop living from my past pain. If there's been generational curses or patterns in your life, you can make the decision to be the change. I didn't grow up with everybody around me being like me. And that's the beauty of who I am. I remember leaving home and going to school farther away and even further away from my other studies. No one around me had really done that. I couldn't think like everyone. I couldn't make my life centered around everyone else. I had to figure out how I could make things better for me. And doing that helps you to write a new story. So now what I found through my own triumphs is that I've helped other people to feel more secure in their own decision making. Even if you don't have the money, the time, the people investing in you, I've shown others that there's way to make a way out of no way. I wasn't born from a silver spoon. I wasn't rich, but I found a way to create a path that was not the same as everybody else's, but it got me to where I wanted to go. And that was through trusting my own process, looking at the past and even the experiences of others, the failures and the successes in order to make my own path clear. Yes, it seems to be easy to be a product of your own environment, but you have to break that curse in order to say you will not be, and you will not accept less than what you deserve. When plans go left, you have to learn how to get right. And for me, that took flexibility without losing direction. You see every situation in my life I had to pretend as if just as well as it could go right, it could also go wrong. Even in my career now, I chose to build several avenues from public speaking to being a professor, to being a clinic director, to now sitting here speaking with you all. I realized that there were different paths for me to have just in case there's a breakdown in the plan. If you create multiple plans to your goals, then you'll be less upset when something doesn't work out. You'll also be less likely to quit or give up on the dream altogether. I remember having someone tell me just because you have to get gas from another station don't mean that car won't run. So sometimes you got to figure out another way, but it doesn't mean that it has to be the only way. Don't let fear of failure block your blessings. I had to learn to redefine failure as feedback. Every time I didn't do well on something, every time I almost failed something, my board exams, the first time I took them, I failed them. I could have given up. I could have figured out something else, but the ultimate goal was still there. It just had to take a detour. And this helped me to build a growth mindset. Through that process, I had to realize, you know, studying differently or finding ways that work better for me as opposed to everyone else might be the way for me to get over this hump. I found that there was a gift in every setback. I ended up passing my boards not two months later just because I used the fear as fuel. It led to me not only passing that board, but going to another state and passing my oral exams and boards in order to get to my ultimate dream. I was able to take that failure, apply it to the next thing in order to increase my confidence for me to climb the ladder. Sometimes failure is enough to teach you a lesson to move forward to your goal. See, sometimes we got to take that risk. Some of us are so planted where we are and we think that we have these bonds with people, places, and things that keep us right where we are. And then we regret it later on in life. You only get one life. And even if you're young right now, you will wake up and be 40 and realize that you haven't moved very far from where you started. There's a psychology to comfort zones. And what happens is we get so comfortable with something. We think that it's guaranteed. And that's why so many of us when we stick with a certain company for so long or we stick with a certain friend or a certain community and that ends, we are very lost. Sometimes challenging yourself teaches you how to flip the script and do things differently. I'm not telling you to go down to the horse races and bet all your money, but maybe you want to invest in the stock market and figure out how that can work for you. Nothing is guaranteed, but sometimes taking a risk teaches you what you're able to do. I've learned to build courage through small changes and they didn't have to be huge in order for me to see gains. Now I've told y'all before, I've been in comfort relationships and one of them lasted as long as three years. When I left that relationship, I remember everybody saying to me, well, aren't you worried? Do you think you'll find someone else? Do you? At that point I really didn't care, right? So I can stay here and be miserable or I can leave and learn to be on my own and be happy with me. That was a risk that was needed in order for me to love me even more. Wasn't a reckless change or a chance. It was definitely a calculated risk and it brought huge dividends. So try to find a way to trust yourself in making even small risks so that you can see that the changes are worth it. These are just a few things that I've learned as I've grown and I've conquered a lot of different things in my life. It's time to start thinking about your future. Yes, living is great, but you don't want to live on a whim. You want to make sure that you make your life count cause you only get one. Let's make sure we comment, share this video with someone who can use it and subscribe. Thanks so much for watching y'all. Beautiful brown baby doll. Peace.