To change, or not to change?

A client sits opposite me and describes their life. On paper, things look fine but something essential is missing, They can feel it and they’ve known it for a long time.

We then come to the part where they tell me what they would like to change. As they continue to talk, they realise that what they need to change is almost everything about how their life is structured.

Bending over backwards

We're adaptable creatures and we're highly skilled at working around problems. If a relationship doesn't support us, it becomes something that we manage. If a career drains us, it becomes something we endure for security and we hold hope that things will improve.

The shift that happens from knowing something doesn’t feel right to adapting to the discomfort can cross into self-abandonment.

We find ourselves compromising so much that we lose sight of how we feel about it. We realise that we’ve become someone we don't recognise in order to keep the peace, maintain the status quo, or meet others people’s expectations.

I know this territory well. Several years ago, I was living with a poorly managed long-term health condition and an enormous amount of stress. I'd built a life around my limitations and what was difficult and I’d found ways to (barely) function with it. I was doing my best to manage symptoms while ignoring several significant life situations that were making me more unwell. I was resigned to accepting a diminished, struggling version of myself as permanent.

The choice that eventually came wasn't between good options. It was between continuing as I was (which I knew was untenable) or dismantling much of what I'd built to pursue something I couldn't guarantee: a more satisfying future.

When clarity doesn’t bring comfort

People sometimes talk about having “moments of clarity” when it comes to making difficult choices. While we can wish for such a thing to occur, the clarity you experience in those moments doesn't necessarily remove the difficulty. If anything, the clarity can intensify it, because when you know what you need to do, you can't un-know it. You can delay it and you can rationalise it, but the knowing may not go away.

This is the burden of these choices. You can see what needs to happen. You can feel, in your body, the cost of not acting but you can also see what the action may cost. It might be your relationships, security, the identity you've built, the story others have about who you are. The stakes are high on both sides. To change or not to change?

What makes these decisions especially difficult is that they often make sense only to you. From the outside, others might see you destroying something that looks like it’s working well.

They might question your judgment, your timing and your motives. They might offer arguments for keeping things as they are, or ask you for patience, or smaller adjustments. Those arguments might sound reasonable, because they're based on what can be seen.

What others can’t see is what you carry inside you in the misalignment, and the slow disappearance of yourself.

The “waiting until the right time” feeling

When the gap between how we're living and how we need to live becomes clear, we often tell ourselves that we will change “soon”. We’ll wait until something settles, when we’re feeling stronger, when circumstances improve, when we have more energy, or more certainty. This is completely understandable. It can feel overwhelming to think about how much resource might be required to bring about a major life change.

Often, these conditions have a way of never quite arriving. There's always another reason to wait and waiting itself can become another adaptation, and a way you practice endurance instead of change.

Some situations do require careful planning, resource-gathering and support-building but there's a difference between practical preparation and indefinite delay. One moves toward change and the other protects you from it.

The "right time" feeling rarely comes before action. It almost always follows it. You may think you need to feel ready, sure and strong enough but those feelings often only emerge from acting in alignment with what matters to you, and not before it.

Rebuilding

Once you’ve chosen to be true to yourself, you may need to begin a period of reconstruction. This time can be disorienting, exhausting, and lonely. You may feel moments of doubt, of grief for what was lost, or of wondering if you've made a huge mistake.

When I chose to make big changes in my life, the immediate result felt like chaos and the opposite of relief. Ways of being and doing that I had followed for years were no longer in existence. Relationships shifted or ended. My sense of myself became unstable. Who was I if I didn’t do x, y and z any more? I had to learn new ways of being that felt alien, awkward, and sometimes very uncomfortable.

Something else happened too, in spite of the chaos. The constant low-grade hum of discomfort and sense of being fundamentally misaligned that I’d been living with began to quiet. I gradually started to recognise a new version of myself and the exhaustion of maintaining a life that required me to be someone other than who I was began to lift.

This is what I tend to see with clients who make these difficult choices. The transition period is hard but there's a quality that emerges that wasn't available before. People move out of the process with a groundedness and a sense of coming back to themselves. Life isn't perfect and they still have struggles but they also often have a kind of integrity that makes the struggle different. They're dealing with the challenges that come from moving towards what's important rather than managing the pain of avoiding it.

If you're sitting with a decision like this, the weight you feel is real. If something in your life means you have to abandon essential parts of yourself, that creates a heavy kind of strain.

These decisions are deeply personal. Choosing to align with your truth and your needs, even when it's difficult, can be incredibly challenging but it can also create space for a kind of life that wasn't possible before. Not always an easier life, but one that's yours.

If you're facing a big decision, take your time with it. Get support and notice what keeps coming back to you, what your body knows and what becomes clear in the quiet moments. Then see if you can trust that enough to take the next step.

Thinking about making a change?

If these words have resonated with you, I warmly invite you to book a free 30-minute introductory session so you can explore how coaching can help you to move forwards, . Click here to book an appointment.