Life Changes
Growing with Life Changes
Finding strength in life’s challenges and developing new insights that may help you to meet difficult transitions constructively.
Change is inevitable – but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. How easy or stressful navigating a life transition is for you can be strongly influenced by how you frame it to yourself. The attitude that we adopt in facing change has a lot to do with how smoothly we can adjust to hurdles.
For some people the issue is not just coping with the frictions that come with a major life change, but understanding what has changed for them – what is meaningfully difficult about the situation. This does not happen automatically for everyone, since the tendency for many, in the face of stress, is to move into action mode, while ignoring what’s going on internally.
Remember that change is not inherently good or bad.
While we may accept that “change is good” — that life would be boring without transitions – some of us can often become so attached to our routines that we go to great lengths to avoid changes. Others seem addicted to change and avoid routine or “settling down.” Some — even when situations are uncomfortable and they don’t like their job, their marriage, their neighbor, or the layout of their furniture — may still prefer to adapt and accommodate than to face the unknown.
While change can be valuable as an antidote to stagnation, that doesn’t mean you won’t worry, or even feel fearful. The disruption of life changes can cause discord and choppiness in your routines, your relationships, and your own sense of ease.
Life Passages
Important life passages such as marriage, giving birth, retirement, illness or death – can be fraught with strong feelings, can complicate relationships, and cause stress. Yet they are also the potential source of joy and growth, however difficult it may be to pivot into the positive aspects of painful change.
Life Transitions
Life transitions also offer the opportunity to gain and refresh perspective. Changing or losing one’s job, having a baby, partnering up, getting a divorce, moving to a different part of the country or immigrating to a new one altogether – these are life transitions that can be painful and difficult as well as exciting and refreshing. But such shake-ups also afford one the opportunity to reorganize and re-evaluate one’s priorities and to be more intentional about what is important and meaningful.
Life Events
Life events are key events in a person’s life, holding more than ordinary significance, remembered and assigned meaning, and often alter the trajectory of a person’s life. Research reported by the American Psychological Association cites that relocation or moving one’s home is one of the most difficult life transitions people experience – and remembered for decades. Changes involving relationships can be the most wrenching. In hindsight, what people value most is having been present to the good and the bad in whatever life event is happening – especially when they can be fully present to their own inner life along with those around them — during these events.
Life Cycle
Although some people enjoy change more than others, the fact is that without it we become stagnant. It is a core aspect of your development as a person. And we are always growing, from the bursts of astonishing change during infancy and childhood to the growth and adaptation in old age.
Coaching for Change
Whether you like change or not, most people find that major life changes and transitions challenge their personalities and their mindset, at times quite painfully.
Coaching can provide support and facilitate growth by helping you understand your reactions to change, and help you approach your situation with compassion and perspective.