How to Change Your Life
Let go of trying to make it ok
Deeply embracing change isn’t comfortable.
It’s nerve-wracking, confusing, frustrating, sad, and maddening. Changing things, or wanting them to change, can make us feel anxious, worried, helpless, and hopeless.
No, I’m not talking about trying on too-small jeans in an airless Target fitting room in the middle of July in the American South, but life changes can feel similar.
They’re really uncomfortable and the process makes us sweat…a lot.
I’ve seen with myself, my clients, and by examining all that developmental psychology stuff that I’ve formally and informally studied in my education and career, that even when we desperately want to change, we humans rally against it.
Our resistance is especially noticeable when we're trying to break a pattern or are stuck and know we need to do something different.
I used to think that I could change things (problematic relationships, bad boss, patterns of self-destruction, something I was complicit in creating) and still please everyone involved…including me.
As an achieving, hard-working person, I could just control all of the external factors and manage everyone's emotions to affect the needed change, right?
Surely I was capable enough to enact big life changes and meet all of the expectations and demands of daily life and those around me so no one would be unhappy or even notice…
That, my friends, is people-pleasing, self-delusional, invisibility energy right there.
“Prior Me” didn't realize that lasting, necessary change doesn't always please everyone...and it may not even please me for the short term.
This doesn’t mean we have to cleave to misery, spiral into despair, blow up everything in our wake or that we can’t share our process, firmly and kindly, with those around us.
For things to actually change so we can make meaningful progress, it means that we must let go of trying to make everything ok during the process.
I've recently begun to recognize that I’m at yet another big transition point in my life. All of my own signs and change patterns are there. My innate self still wants to control this transition & people's perceptions of me. I want to try to problem solve and come up with the answers and formulate the plan right now so I can control what happens next. I still want to appear as "the same Michelle," even though I'm not.
We all go through periods where we recognize that we’ll never be the same if we’re growing in our human experiences.
My current self, who has spent a lot of time actively undoing patterns, knows that I can't grab onto external things to try to control and change them. My current self is more comfortable with the uncomfortable stages of change.
Letting go of the need to make things ok and not micromanaging the process allows the change process to actually happen, and usually results in more depth, clarity, and possibility.
It takes work to not just jump in and try to fix our discomfort immediately. It’s often harder work to not perpetuate old patterns.
If you're going through a change, or want something to change, take a moment to stop.
Get curious about your own emotions & motivations around the situation. If you find your patterns are repeating ask yourself what you keep going back to and how that is serving you.
Stopping and noticing will allow you the space to break the pattern of sameness so you can create new ones that serve you better.
The pause is often mightier than the action.
xox, Michelle
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