“If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.” – Gail Sheehy, New Passages
As the clock rushes from 2019 to 2020 – the start of a new decade – take full inventory, both the wins and losses. It’s rarely one or the other. Celebrate the wins and find the lessons in the loss. Our natural inclination is to put more weight on the loss than the gain. When we dare to awaken to the gifts in each day, we keep growing, embracing change and transitions that are the fabric of life.
According Managing Transitions author William Bridges, there are three phases to transition:
Ending – letting go of old ways and old identity;
The Neutral Zone – in between time with the old being gone and the new not fully arrived;
The New Beginning – coming out fully of transition into a new beginning with a new energy and purpose.
Many days feel like we’re stuck in the neutral zone, clinging to old ways and the past. Accepting and diving right in the middle of change can move us to new beginnings, new stories. Resistance delays the gift of new beginnings.
In her Ted Talk How changing your story can change your life, therapist Lori Gottlieb talks about the stories we tell ourselves, “The psychologist Jerome Bruner described this beautifully -- he said, ‘To tell a story is, inescapably, to take a moral stance.’ All of us walk around with stories about our lives. Why choices were made, why things went wrong, why we treated someone a certain way -- because obviously, they deserved it -- why someone treated us a certain way -- even though, obviously, we didn't. Stories are the way we make sense of our lives.
But what happens when the stories we tell are misleading or incomplete or just wrong? Well, instead of providing clarity, these stories keep us stuck. We assume that our circumstances shape our stories. But what I found time and again in my work is that the exact opposite happens. The way we narrate our lives shapes what they become. That's the danger of our stories, because they can really mess us up, but it's also their power. Because what it means is that if we can change our stories, then we can change our lives.”
Gottlieb continues with poignant life-changing advice, “instead of being authors of our own unhappiness, we get to shape these stories while we're still alive. We get to be the hero and not the victim in our stories, we get to choose what goes on the page that lives in our minds and shapes our realities. …life is about deciding which stories to listen to and which ones need an edit. And that it's worth the effort to go through a revision because there's nothing more important to the quality of our lives than the stories we tell ourselves about them. I say that when it comes to the stories of our lives, we should be aiming for our own personal Pulitzer Prize.”
Change your story, change your life. 2020 will be filled with both wins and losses. Enter this new year with a fresh hope and create your story. Accept and roll with change, count all of your blessings, fully embracing growth with daily joy as your companion.
Change, transition? Bring it on, growth and transformation is just around the corner. Unstuck and unafraid - all in! Let’s do this.
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature; to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” – Henri Bergson