We Don’t Change Until…
An uncomfortable truth about those New Year’s Resolutions:
We don’t change until the actual pain of not changing exceeds the perceived pain of trying something different.
The paradoxical good news, once we make it over that high change-aversion threshold, is:
The bigger the pain, the bigger the turnaround.
That’s why I’m deeply grateful that shit hit the fan so early in my life.
It took nervous breakdowns, health crises, career changes, relocations, a divorce, and several toxic relationships for me to finally:
- loosen my controlling grip on life
- learn to rest and take breaks
- take reliably good care of my body
- stop overcommitting
- stop trying to fix other people
- access my emotions
- learn to trust myself
- stop conflating my identity with my job title
- communicate assertively
- practice trusting other people
- stop being cruel to myself
What I needed to change was no small task – not a simple “work out more” or “wake up earlier” kind of resolution.
Instead, I needed to fix a profoundly broken relationship with myself.
And I needed to hit some very painful walls to hold my attention on the real problem long enough to do something about it.
This is why I’m only interested in coaching people who have lived through some heavy stuff.
- They’re under no illusions that the status quo is sustainable
- They have enough depth to courageously examine the old patterns that need to get deprecated out of the current version of their lives
In the words of Richard Rohr: “Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.”
All the hard stuff is an invitation to a different and better way forward.
If you’re ready to open up that invitation, let’s talk.
