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There seems to be a lot of people feeling lost right now. Myself included.
Even if you take the crazy world of pageantry out of the equation for a second, we seem to be increasingly living in a world where no-one knows what’s going to be happening tomorrow, let alone in five or ten years from now.
Add to that the ever increasing price of living and the fact that we seem hopelessly divided on issues such as politics, religion, climate change, and AI, is it really any wonder that many of us are feeling a bit lost?
I work a lot with teenagers and young women, many of whom are finishing up high school or college and are wondering what’s supposed to come next in life.
Side note: I always thought it was ridiculous that you were somehow supposed to choose a college degree that would determine the direction of the rest of your life when you were just seventeen or eighteen and had literally no idea what the real world was actually about. Just me?
I don’t know about you, but I was never asked in school or in college what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I was definitely never asked about my goals or given a plan as to how to find a fulfilling career.
Instead, what I do remember is having to attend early morning classes where the lecturer would simply read their notes from the projector out loud, making me wonder why I couldn’t simply have read them myself at home and saved myself an early morning wakeup time. I also remember taking a math class on n-dimensional calculus and being unable to figure out what was wrong with just the three dimensional world I thought we all lived in.
So let me ask you a question. It’s the same one I’ve been asking of myself and many of my clients recently:
What do you want your life to look like?
How would you describe a perfect day?
What do you love doing?
What do you hate doing?
As many of you know, I just got back from Miss USA in Miami, Florida. It might surprise you to know that I spent very little time playing tourist, and instead spent a lot of time reading. Not so much because I love reading, but because I felt I needed new ideas and new perspectives.
In fact, that was why I wanted to fly halfway around the world to go to Miss USA in the first place. I knew that being immersed in that environment would help me determine what direction to take next and what I wanted the next phase of my life to look like.
After all, pageantry is many things, but it is rarely boring. Many are yearning for it to return to its glory days when it dominated the airwaves and titleholders were household names.
Call me a cynic, but that’s never going to happen.
Pageantry is now firmly a niche hobby. It will always have its audience because it’s been such an important part of the cultural fabric of countries such as the USA for so long, but the central problem for the industry, at least recently, has been its struggle to maintain relevancy after the ‘pretty girls in bikinis’ era ended.
It’s tried many things, but nothing’s really landed, not in terms of capturing the public’s imagination anyway.
So what do we do when the industry we’ve dedicated so much of our toil to is struggling? When the public is still largely confused as to how a married woman over the age of thirty could become Miss USA? And when the industry now seems to make front page news only when there’s been another scandal?
We sit. In silence. We think. We learn. We grow. We strategize.
We reinvent ourselves.
Just because pageantry has struggled to reinvent itself, doesn’t mean we should follow suit. Frankly, if there is a way to truly ‘future proof’ ourselves in this crazy world, it will be through reinvention, growth, and learning to get comfortable with uncertainty.
I’m not saying you need to spend thousands of dollars on a course or live as a hermit in a cave for the next twelve months. Start small.
What’s something you’ve always wanted to learn?
What’s a hobby you’ve always wanted to take up?
What’s a skillset you could learn that would help you level up your health, your finances, or your relationship?
So whether you decide to take a stack of books to your next pageant like me or you decide to pursue the new and improved version of yourself in some other manner, make sure to spend some time thinking, dreaming, and envisioning:
What do you want your life to look like?
Adrian.
The Beginner’s Guide to Pageantry - Everything You Need to Compete in Your First Pageant With Confidence... Even If You’re Starting From Zero:
