I’ve been writing this blog post for a few weeks now and it has bottle-necked any other post from coming along. Know what I mean?
Today I read the Transitions are Tough post by Christine Gilbert on her blog Almost Fearless. She, her husband and their 18 mo baby are traveling the world. Something I would love to do, which is why I read her blog. Anyway, this post spoke to me and has given me the push I needed to finish this post or at least to post it. So here goes (with a bonus TEDx talk that Christine talked about in her post):
Change is scary. It often sets off chain reactions that cause other things to change. We don’t always know at the beginning what those other reactions will be, but we have enough experience with change to know it leads to other change.
Change is hard bloody work. Entropy keeps pushing back, trying to get us back to the original state. That means if you want to make change, you have to keep pushing without letting up, without a ‘day off’, without slipping. That’s the real hard part.
Nothing happens until things change. We can hope, dream, spend endless time in visioning exercises, but until we do the work of change, nothing will happen.
Once change happens, there’s no going back. New ideas supplant old ones.
The fear of change doesn’t go away, but with practice, it gets easier. Once in a while you look back and realize that the change you feared didn’t hurt you and now you have this new version that’s cooler than it was. As you turn back to face the future, your fear of change is more manageable because you are clear about the benefits.
Change involves loss. Loss of what was to make room for what will be. Adding a new habit means not doing something else to make the time for it. If you want to add, say, an exercise/writing/meditation habit first thing in the morning, and still get to your day at the same time, you will have to drop something else. Usually sleep, which will become going to bed earlier, which will usually mean less tv. Not a bad thing, to be sure, but then, what will you talk about at the water cooler?
“If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too.”
— Dr. Seuss
I’m working hard on making that transition from self-employed bookkeeper to business owner. All these things are showing up. I would have thought it was pretty straight-forward – I’ve thought of myself as a business owner, rather than just a doer for a few years, now. I’ve had staff in here pretty much steady for 3 years. You’d think I’d be over this by now but I’m still feeling change happen.
Here’s an interesting TEDx talk by Brené Brown talking about the feelings we all have that make it difficult to get beyond ourselves to do the authentic work we want to do. Thanks to Christine for bringing it to my attention and giving me the push I needed today.
