Are you tired of all the rah-rah-rah messaging you hear from the guru types? The “Look at my amazing life and you can do it too (insert sparkling Colgate smile here)!” hype you see all over social media and spammed to your inbox?
It kind of feels empty, doesn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong. I am ALL about living a better life, but I am tired of people creating this ridiculous myth about change. “Just decide to go for it and IT will happen!” “Just change your mind”. Sometimes I just want to scream back at them, “Shut up!”
The problem with these types of messages is that when you hear them from a place of misalignment, confusion and deep unhappiness, it only serves to push you further down. You assume since you don’t get it (or have tried but not gotten results) that there must be something innately wrong with you. So your confidence to try again decreases while a sense of hopelessness creeps in.
Change is not about intelligence. You are already a smart cookie and if you knew how to change everything you didn’t like, you would have already done it. Change is about an emotional capacity, a muscle to flex and strengthen along the way as you learn new skills. And you can start at any point, no matter how small you feel. No need to be an emotional Iron Man brainiac first.
Change is Hard
It’s this kind of deceptive marketing that traps people into feeling helpless and unworthy. Let me be the first to say: CHANGE IS HARD. It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, the reward for achieving it wouldn’t be so worth it.
And it IS worth it…when you get there.
But in the meantime, it sucks, especially during the initial stage. Not the initial part of the change when you get the insight (that may sting a bit, but you will get over it). Not even the decision to do something about it (which may take a bit of time and a whole lot of getting over your fear) without knowing where to start.
Change is like birthing yourself. It’s messy and there are bodily fluids like tears and snot all over.
Both are nothing compared to the actual doing.
Beginning to make the change, to implement the ideas/plan you came up with is where the challenge begins. Taking those steps can be really hard, like walking with concrete boots or trying to speak with your lips glued together. It’s impossible to even know how hard until you start. You might think you are going crazy or having a breakdown, and that is all part of the process. That’s why you need support to make it through the change process.
It’s tempting to start beating yourself up, especially when you hit a roadblock or backslide in your efforts. The ‘shame shit storm’ shows up and the familiar tapes start running. You need to do the opposite: love yourself even more, waaaaay more, give yourself even more compassion and grace because you are doing it. No matter how it looks, you are doing it.
Do NOT compare your change to the way others are doing it. Your process is as unique as you.
You may not know what you are doing on any given day, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Just keep going. Keep going even when it feels like a struggle, and it sucks and you just want to give up and go back. Keep going no matter how hard it gets because you know where you were is not as comfortable as you thought, and the end is going to be worth it. YOU are worth it.
Think of it like going into your own personal cocoon. Like the caterpillar who crawls into to the unknown – who you know had no idea she would be in for the fight of her life to get out – you don’t know what you will become when you emerge. Perhaps you too will discover your wings and fly like a butterfly.
Are you struggling with change? Are you tired of feeling like it has to be all rainbows and unicorns? Give me a call to set up your own personal change consultation.