Life Transition Tips
No matter what's happening in your life it's likely you are experiencing one or more changes. It could be changes in your relationships, your family, your health, your home, your spiritual life, or your finances.
If you've been in the midst of change for any length of time, you may be hearing advice from friends and family to get over it...move on...get back into action...get on with your life!
This strategy of just getting over whatever is happening in your life may work for a time, but in the end it's quite likely you'll be right back where you started before too long: frustrated, confused, and worried that you'll be in this state forever.
The reason "getting over it" doesn't work is that any time you make decisions and choices from the place of who-you-have-been, you are, by definition, limiting your options.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
If change has happened in your life, your life is not the same...and as a result, you are changed. Your needs are different. Your passions evolve.
Even if you voluntarily choose to make a change in your life, what you were doing wasn't working to begin with so creating something new based on who-you-have been will not work. The old adage comes to mind: If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting.
To find your way through any kind of change, you must explore who-you-are-becoming. This is one of the most important pivots you can make as you navigate a transition in your life.
Within the Seasons of Change, each season represents a different phase of your journey--with different goals, different tasks, and different detours that have the potential to take you off course. These seasons are a metaphor that reflects where you are in your journey and may or may not match the seasons unfolding outside.
As you read the following description, think about the change you are experiencing in your life right now. (If you have a few transitions going on at once, focus on the change that feels most important to you in this moment.)
1: Start in the center of the diagram in Summer. Remember back to a time when life was moving along. You may have known about changes on the horizon, or not, but these changes weren't the focus of your life like they are now.
2. Then one day, you noticed that the life you thought you were living really didn't align with the life you realized you were now living. Perhaps you were happy living where you were living, and then suddenly you found out you had to move. Or you were in a job you liked, and then you got a pink slip.
3. Although you may have been taught to ignore changes in hopes they would go away by themselves, that strategy rarely works. Acknowledging that a change is indeed happening in your life is one of the most powerful things you can do to start your healing journey. When you make this decision you've entered Fall, your journey shifts and you move onto the spiral journey.
Following this journey through the seasons takes you through a process of connecting with who-you-are-becoming, releasing what's no longer going to work for you and claiming what you know to be true for you. This recalibration gives you a whole new perspective on what's been happening.
4. At first it's likely you'll feel like you are in "I Don't Know" Land of the Winter Solstice. You won't be clear about what you want or how to create it. When you don't know how to set the stage for this internal exploration and you don't know what questions to ask, you can swirl around in this fog for quite some time!
The key to the turning point in the Winter Solstice is to begin to ask yourself new questions. Why? Because new questions bring out new answers. New answers offer new perspectives, new insights, and eventually that aha moment where you see your life from a new vantage point. When you reach that point, you will see new opportunities you can't see right now. In fact, you can't even imagine them right now, because you haven't shifted into that new perspective yet. Sometimes this shift happens in one conversation or a dream. Other times it's a series of insights that comes together to open the door to a new way of seeing your life. However these insights show up, you want to be aware enough to notice that something new just happened. These insights can be fleeting, so stay quiet enough to notice them, catch them, and record them.
5. With a seed of a new idea in mind, you begin to turn up the spiral, moving toward Spring and Summer where you'll be in action again! Before you leap into action, however, take some time in Late Winter to explore your options, gather information, experiment with different possibilities to see how they feel. As you gain more familiarity with what's evolving, you'll begin getting the pieces in place so you can take the actions required to bring this new idea to life.
6. Although you may feel a little uneasy as you step into new roles and new elements of your Spring life, that will soon pass as you get your feet back under you. From there you'll continue to grow and evolve your life into Summer. At some point, you'll notice something's not working or doesn't feel right (Fall). At that point you'll begin the spiral again to evolve your life in a new way.