How Do I Know?

In about a week, I’ll be announcing a significant and substantial shift in the way I work. Some of you know that this is months in the making, and others of you have gone all Nancy Drew, noting that I’ve been making small changes along the way to open up space for this New Thing.

I’m actually quite beside myself with excitement and trying very hard not to spill the beans.

But the announcement with all the details is going to have to wait until September 17th – I promise that when I can blurt it all out, you’ll be among the first to know.

It’s curious that this whole experience has brought into sharper focus the struggles so many of my clients face. I have no idea why the bulk of the human species wrestle with change, but it sure seems we do.

Change sticks up its shiny little head and:

We jump back from it, like encountering a hissing rattler in the weeds.

We stew and fret, trying  to forecast and overthink because we absolutely, positively can’t allow ourselves to be wrong.

We attempt to force an outcome we’ve decided will be perfect.

We avoid it all together, stick our fingers in our ears, shut our eyes and say “nanny nanny boo boo, I can’t hear you!” and hope it passes us by and lands on the next sucker guy.

Oh, I just love us.

But when we look back on our lives from the remove of years, we can see that the change we dreaded – starting freshman year in high school, for instance – turned out…more or less okay. Most of us went on to sophomore year and laughed about how anxious and tense we were as little freshpunks. As seniors, we shook our heads at how young the freshmen were and even extended our hands to those kids-who-were-once-us and gave a little help and mentorship.

Today, though, as adults we face the equivalent of freshman year anxiety and worry any time we face a situation and we’re not completely 100% sure how it’s going to turn out.

Which is hilarious, when you think of it, because you didn’t know how freshman year was going to turn out, did you? And you worried, agonized, ironed your jeans and primped your hair for hours and hours before the first day. And that was just the boys. The girls… forget about it. We started worrying about freshman year in Pre-K.

But before you knew it, the freshman year was over and you had made a few new good friends and some great memories, and you hadn’t been tossed into a locker by the varsity wrestling team once.

Probably.

This new thing came up for me several months ago. Rather than resist the idea out of hand because I already had a successful business which I’ve loved running for the last nine years, and we all know that what’s not broke you don’t need to fix. No, this time I leaned into the opportunity and asked myself a lot of good questions. Like, “What do I want at this point in my career?” Like, “What does my family need?” and “What do I need?” And, “How can I grow?” I considered whether I use all of my strengths, skills and talents in my current work.

I wondered if by making a change I might have the opening to be an even fuller version of myself.

And, as I tested and tried and gathered information to answer my questions, the realization came – this change is a big YES. A big, honking YES to me, and to how I want to grow in my service to you and to others I haven’t yet met.

That’s how I knew. That’s how I knew that this particular change is the right one to make.

And I can’t wait to tell you about it. Until then, as much as it’s killing me – mum’s the word.