If you were to ask a caterpillar if she wanted to become a butterfly, I suspect the answer would be something along the lines of, “Absolutely yes! I would love to float, fly and flit between all the pretty flowers. This crawling around is driving me crazy."
However, if you were to re-interview that caterpillar, after she had laboriously secured herself in a protective place, shed her entire skin, and began to dissolve her existing body into a stem-cell-like, undifferentiated soup - within the darkness of the chrysalis – you might get a different answer. Perhaps, “I had no idea change would be so difficult.” or “Help, get me out of here, I am scared of losing everything.” “Maybe this becoming a butterfly is not such a good idea.”
The point is, we may all desire to make some big changes in our lives and careers, but these types of changes are rarely easy.
What to do?
Actually, let’s start with what not to do. If you have a strong or persistent calling to make some important changes in your life - and if you have examined the calling long enough to know it is not coming from fear or ego - DO NOT IGNORE IT!! History and the teachings of myth are pretty clear on this. Shakespeare sums up the consequences of ignoring a big calling to change succinctly in the play Julius Caesar where Brutus states, "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.” You don’t want to spend your one precious life wallowing around in the shallows or miseries.
So, if ignoring, or medicating away, the calling to change does not work, what does? Here are some key factors to consider, drawn from the best of positive psychology, neuroscience, myth and the spiritual traditions:
- First, you really benefit from creating the time and space to explore the possibility of a major change. (Big changes require a lot of time and energy. If you are running too busy, you might end up leaping before you have looked, or never leaping at all.)
- Secondly, you will definitely benefit from knowing enough about yourself to understand what does bring you more joy, meaning, success, etc, whatever you want more of. (If you don’t know what you are looking for, how are you going to find it?)
- You will definitely benefit from a vision of a best possible outcome of the change that inspires or moves you. (Inspiration is a big force in helping us move past our current beliefs and limitations.)
- You will definitely benefit from having a plan, even if it is really basic. (Failure to plan is too often planning to fail.)
- You will definitely benefit from having the support of allies. (Changes can be hard, with many moments when you feel like giving up. Being able to plug into the emotional support of your friends, colleagues, partners, coach, etc. – can make a critical difference, and remind you why you set off on this change in the first place.)
- You will definitely, benefit from proactively managing your stress. (Too much stress can make a coward out of anyone.)
- You will definitely benefit from building on your strengths. (Building on your weaknesses leads to mediocrity.)
- You will definitely benefit from learning to do your best, but remain unattached to the outcome. (This is a very important teaching. Attachment to a specific outcome creates a bit of tunnel vision which can prevent you from adjusting and adapting to all the unforeseen circumstances that will come your way. And there will be many.)
If you have some big changes to make, or some have been thrust upon you, have faith. The single most common thing I see, in working with hundreds and hundreds of people making big changes, is – even if at first glance the change looked like an uninvited disaster - that in some unexplained way the change always led them to a better place.
