Change can be defined as something that disrupts our usual routine or comfort zone. Whether by choice or not, changing is difficult – and can trigger fear, insecurities and anxiety. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we cannot avoid it: change is a constant in everyone’s lives.
“ There is nothing permanent except change.”
– Heraclitus
And you might ask: are there any strategies to deal with change in a lighter and less challenging way?
I believe so. And understanding it gives us a lot of power over our lives.
I’ve lived in 4 different countries; called off a wedding; moved from corporate life to being an entrepreneur then back to corporate again. I’ve broken up and been broken up with. I’ve also had to change jobs – and career paths – due to external forces. I’ve changed my style and taste so many times that I’ve lost count. I change my opinion frequently because I love feeling like I’m evolving. But that doesn’t mean that the butterflies in my stomach don’t appear every time I decide to make a change. And it also doesn’t mean that I feel calm when an unexpected change happens to me. If there’s one thing we never learn not to care about, even just a little bit, it’s change.
But I argue that it is possible to alleviate this process. After all, changes will happen – and all we can do is, for our well-being and mental health, learn to deal with them.
CHANGE INDUCES UNCERTAINTY, WHICH GENERATES ANXIETY
Regardless of scale or origin, changes bring unpredictability. And unpredictability shows us that we are not in control. And it is exactly this lack of control that brings, even if in different proportions, anxiety to all of us.
In the Episode #01 of the Morada Podcast (in Portuguese), we talk exactly about this. Má and I shared the challenges we faced when moving to Switzerland. Even though we feel we were preparing ourselves for this change for a long time, life has always a way to surprises us – and we felt it. As we always say: our sense of control is just a sense – it’s not real.
Think about it: what can you REALLY control in your life?
THE FALSE SENSE OF CONTROL
You are not alone. All of us, human beings, have this need for control. Its intensity varies from person to person, but it is present in each of us – even if we don’t want to admit it. This brings us peace of mind. It’s comfortable to know “what’s next.”
We want to control how people see us and what people think of us, we want to control our professional success, we want to control the lives of those we love and what will happen in our daily lives. I, for example, get extremely anxious when I feel I’ve been misunderstood – because, in these situations, I see how out of my control what someone absorbs from what I say or do really is. I also feel anxious when my expectations are disappointed. Expectations are, generally speaking, a disguise for a desire for control. But just as certain as our need for control, is the unpredictability of life. Even us, ourserlves, are not predictable.
Every day we have the false feeling of being in control – but understanding that we don’t need that feeling is liberating.
Of course, preparing for changes is essential – as we reinforced in Episode #01 of the Morada Podcast. But what we cannot ignore or stop working to improve is our adaptability. How can we deal lightly with what we cannot control?
PROBLEM OR OPPORTUNITY?
Our mindset has a huge impact on how we live our lives. Believing that there is meaning in practically any situation we experience, just waiting for us to find it, helps us see changes – and their consequente challenges – as opportunities rather than problems.
Sometimes, the opportunity is for reflection: a lesson learned so that perhaps we can do it differently next time. Other times, it is more practical: we have a frustrated expectation now just to get something better later. How many times have you come across a situation like this? You couldn’t achieve what you thought would be ideal, but ended up achieving something that was more beneficial or made mor sense later on?
I’m a very positive person and I have to be careful not to be to extreme, lol. But I always reinforce how much this mentality, which makes me believe that everything happens for a (good) reason, helps me.
I learned that no matter how challenging change, lack of control, or frustrated expectations may be, I can always see it through the lens of opportunity. I often joke that we have two different type of glasses to see life: one is a like regular sunglasses and the other is just a frame, but it has several mini and very bright lights on it. In a challenging context, when we are initially facing a “dark” situation, which one do you think helps you see better?
The one with dark lenses, as you may have already imagined, are the glasses of the problem, while the one with lights are the glasses of opportunity. It’s the one with the light that will bright up the situation and allow you to see it more clearer. It’s a simple analogy, but if you enjoy simples representations like I do, you can, whenever you face a challenging change, think: wait, which glasses do I choose to put on now?
And no, glasses are not a magic trick that eliminates fears, anguish and sadness. But they help these feeling not to last as long. Because we just need to look calmly at the situation to see an opportunity there. And when we do this, we find a why, a reason, and we get ready to start a new movement.
MOVEMENT AND ADAPTABILITY
Something very common that happens to all of us when we face changes is to put ourselves in the position of a victim. Memorize this to never forget: the worst place we can put ourselves is as a victim. Because then we stop being protagonists of our lives. We think: every bas thing that happens to us is someone else’s fault – poor us. Which translates as: there’s nothing I can do to solve it – since I have no responsibility or impact on what happens to me. This puts us in a position of inertia, with no movement to change the situation, without any movement to adapt to the new context and do our best to transform it into something more favorable for us.
Má and I talk a lot about movement. About our power to act, get it off the ground, make it happen. But something else is also importante: the small physical ones, like getting up, taking a shower and going for a walk. The simple fact of getting out of the state of inertia when we are feeling lost and blue will stimulate our brain and start shifting our emotions to something a bit lighter. When the impact of a change is so challenging that we find ourselves stuck in our bed or on the sofa without even wanting to move, the first step is to focus on small steps. One foot at a time, on the ground, towards your first walk.
And when this movement happens, grab the chosen glasses. Get the one with the little lights, and look for opportunities previously hidden in this situation.
Is it always easy? No – not at all. Because for movement to happen, for the lights on our glasses to turn on and for us to be willing to actually put them on our face, we need at least a little bit of something called self-esteem.
Do you have SELF-ESTEEM?
I asked some friends this question recently and many of them said “not really”. I was surprised, but not that much. We live in an era of comparison. More than ever, the neighbor’s grass is much greener than ours. Social media intensifies successes and hides the frustrations, the true feelings and the challenges that we all face every day.
It’s very common for us to develop a feeling of inferiority. We think that with us, everything is worse. We see daily proof that we don’t make as much money, have as much success, as much happiness, nor as many opportunities – or even as much love – as the people we follow every day online. If our self-esteem is not strong, al these things will have great impact on us. And we start shrinking, questioning ourselves negatively – and for every challenge faced, we see more problems and retreat into victimhood.
I still go through that too. You are not alone. But I’m learning to get out of the inertia in a faster way.
Low self-esteem affects many of us and has countless impacts on our lives. If you think about it you will see that, in fact, everything is cyclical. Low self-esteem triggers the need for control. The need for control, as we have already seen, hinders the process of adapting to changes, as it generates anxiety. And anxiety, fear and victimism leave us in inertia, without movement. And without movement, we can’t get our light glasses, and we can’t see life’s opportunities. And you guesses right: without this, our self-worth and self-esteem are affected again, which awakens an even greater need for control… and so on.
HOW TO BREAK THE CYCLE?
I learned to love myself. It feels a bit silly to write it like this, so unfiltered. But it’s true. I needed to learn to compare less, judge myself less and recognize my true value. I needed to recognize my achievements without guilt.
I used to live in contradiction: I was victimizing myself by blaming the world and others for my challenges – which would make me see myself as unlucky, incapable. But at the same time, I denied my achievements because I was ashamed of having so much – compared to so much suffering that other people experienced. I lived with the guilt of success, not wanting to honor it, and with the victimization of my difficulties, thinking I didn’t deserve them.
I couldn’t see anything lightly. I hadn’t been able to celebrate achievements or see opportunities. It was so easy to complain and blame the world. It was so easy to feel sorry for myself.
A friend once told to me: it’s comfortable, right Quel, to be in sadness and not have to take responsibility or act. And unfortunately it is true – that’s how we see it. An immediate comfort. We just can’t see the bad consequences it has.
Researches about self-knowledge, podcasts about mental health and emotional intelligence courses helped me a lot. It is a long and continuous process. I have studied human behavior for years and used myself as a guinea pig – seeing incredible effects in my life. But nothing would have helped if I hadn’t accepted that I am the protagonist of my life, that I deserve my achievements and that I must honor my challenges – and that if I don’t do it for myself, my life will be at the mercy of chance.
RESILIENCE AND SELF-COMPASSION
Change teaches us about resilience, flexibility and even self-compassion (less judgment and less criticism of ourselves). And self-compassion, for me, will always be the first step to better dealing with challenging situations. Be kind to yourself. Don’t define yourself as incapable, unlucky, complicated or inferior. Get rid of the labels and seek self-love. If you can’t find anything to love within yourself, seek professional help. Work on your self-esteem.
Then, with that glimmer of hope, get moving. Go into motion understanding that you are in charge. And that doesn’t mean that you have control over your life and the people around you, but that you have power over your actions. That you are the protagonist. And that you can choose how to act. That you can guide your actions and your mindset. This is the moment when you can take action by putting on the right glasses. Remember the question: problem or opportunity?
Accepting what we cannot change and acting towards what we can is the key to resilience. It’s the key to adaptability. And that’s what will guide you to understand that we don’t need to be in control of everything to be able to face changes more lightly. We can just accept it and move on.
ACCEPTANCE
Accepting the situation as it is does not mean that you endorse it or that you are satisfied or happy with it. It simply means that you understand that all you can control in life is yourself – and what you choose to do and say.
Acceptance is consciously choosing to be lighter instead of torturing yourself with what you cannot change.
Má and I always say that we do not seek to stimulate in people (or in ourselves) the vision of: “accept it and let it happen”, or even “visualize what you want to achieve and it will magically happen”. We defend acceptance, yes, for the peace it brings. (Note we do believe in the importance of the visualization exercise – but this is a talk for another day). But this peace should propel you towards movement. It is action, followed by acceptance and the desire to improve the current scenario, that has the power for transformation.
We need to move towards our desires – instead of blaming everything we have no control over. It is this positive movement that provides adaptability. And then we achieve something greater: a personal growth towards a lighter life. A strength.
HOW TO FACE CHANGES FROM NOW ON?
Heraclitus says a person cannot enter the same river twice. That’s because the river flows and is never exactly the same. And because we, ourselves, also change and are never the same. We change every second, even if just a little.
We have no control over the river, but we have a lot of power over us.
I invite you to take a deeper look inside yourself today. I invite you to revisit the changes and challenges you are facing and take a better look at them, this time with the opportunity glasses. I invite you to step away from victimization and start to see yourself as protagonist. I invite you to reflect: what can you do today to change your reality and achieve what you want? Don’t blame the other, don’t blame the universe, don’t blame life. Look at yourself. You can do it.
And then start moving…
Take today the first step towards becoming the main character of your life.
