I have an important message that can help you with your small business, but first I have personal story to tell you about me when I was a teenager and how I learned the hard way that life doesn’t always turn out how you plan it.

When I was 17 years old, I asked a girl to be my first ever girlfriend.

Well, I sorta asked… She pretty much set the whole thing up to where I basically had to ask, only because I was incredibly shy and suffered from very low self-esteem. (long story, I’ll get to it some other time)

Anyway, this girl was my first real girlfriend. There were other girls I used to like that I would hang out with and take them on unofficial dates and whatnot, but this was the first and only real relationship I’ve been in during my teenage years.

I thought she was incredible. We met at church and I liked how she dressed modestly and took care of her mother (her mom dealt with a lot of health problems) and overall was just a pleasant person to be around.

So we were together for two years. I took her to my high school prom and we would spend hours on the phone each night.

Over time our relationship became more and more intense. I remember we had names picked out for at least three kids even though we were saving ourselves for marriage. We imagined the kind of life we would have living in the Bronx, NYC. This meant a lot to me because as I mentioned, I struggled from a low self esteem and spent most of my young life feeling lonely and unwanted. I didn’t believe any girl would find me attractive and here was this girl planning out the rest of her life with me.

I felt blessed to have her in my life, and I felt my life of loneliness was finally over. I found the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with at 17 and I didn’t even need to go dating around to find her. I was just fine with that!

Alas, things don’t always turn out the way you plan it…

In 2002, I was 19 years old by this time when I graduated from high school. Entering into a new life as a college student but with my lovely girlfriend by my side, I had a lot to look forward to…

My subconscious mind apparently didn’t think this was all hugs and cuddles. Around this time, I got struck with a period of what was diagnosed as anxiety disorder.

In case you’re not familiar with the symptoms, anxiety disorder has a wide menu ranging from heart palpitations; uncontrollable sweat followed by tingly sensations in your hands and feet; the feeling of dying (yes, can you believe that); fainting and dizziness; feeling your heart is stopping; detachment from reality… and I had these symptoms non-stop 24 hours a day for a whole YEAR. That’s right, the symptoms weren’t off-and-on… it was non-stop! Imagine going through that!

After a year of struggling, I was finally free from these symptoms and got over my anxiety. As crazy as this may sound though, my girlfriend got attacked with a bout of anxiety almost immediately after!

Some things you just can’t explain… To this day I don’t know if it was that which caused her to do it or if it was something else, but not too long after she was attacked with anxiety, she let me go.

The one real relationship with the girl I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with.. was gone.

Those feelings of loneliness and low self-esteem… feeling unwanted and ugly and horrible… welcome back!

I won’t go into the troubling months that proceeded this as I went through a lot, but suffice to say – everything I had planned for my life was completely torn away from me and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Life doesn’t always turn out how you plan it… But it can turn out better.

As I sit here writing this blog article, delving into a past relationship well over a decade old, I type away sitting at my computer inside my house. My wife upstairs working on her music and my daughter sleeping in our bedroom next to me.

The pain I felt in my late teens… the feelings of not being worthy of a woman’s love or feeling inadequate and unable to succeed in life… all that in hindsight to the life I live now where I am married to a beautiful woman who adores me no matter how stupid I act and a little girl who calls me “da-da” looking at me with those beautiful blue eyes…

It seems as though all that transpired in my past was meaningless, but I couldn’t see that then. All I knew was the present. I couldn’t see myself married to the woman I’m with or be a dad to such an adoring little girl. My life is so much better now than it ever was by comparison… but it wasn’t how I planned it.

It turned out better than how I planned it.

What does this mean for you?

I hope you got some inspiration from this, but if you need me to bring it on home, let me put it this way:

You may have envisioned your life to look and be a certain way. You probably had goals for your career and life probably looks different in this moment than how you wanted it to be. Some of that can be good but we can at least acknowledge that our present is vastly different than our past. Is it better? Worse? That’s up to you to decide.

However, this is how life goes… I planned to be with one girl the rest of my life… What I got was a beautiful woman 10 times better for me than I planned it.

What you need to do is set a plan for your life. Set your goals and work towards them. Be open minded, because the plans you have created may not be what you end up with – they may just be better than you could have ever imagined.