Afraid To Make A Change? Here's Your Wake Up Call.
“I don’t know exactly what I want, but I do know it’s not this.”
I heard a twenty something woman say this the other day in conversation. She was stuck in the hustle of corporate America and felt immensely unhappy and unfulfilled with her work.
“Sometimes I feel that if I spend one more minute in that cubicle, I’m going to scream.” She looked up at me with worry in her eyes that told me she feared I thought she was crazy. Instead I smiled at her and said, “I totally get what ya mean.”
So many of us know in our gut when something isn’t right - when a relationship is no longer working, when our typical Saturday night out is no longer fun, when our job becomes soul-sucking. So then what stops us from making a change?
It ain’t rocket science, friends.
The fear of the unknown is what paralyzes us.
We think:
Well I don’t know what a new career would look like for me. I’m still trying to figure out my passion.
What if I leave my partner and then immediately regret it, but it’s too late to go back? What if I never meet another person to fall in love with again?
If I don’t go out on the weekend, won’t I have wasted precious “fun” time, and then will have to wait a whole other week to be able to play again?
Fear takes the form of questions, and they run rampant in our brains. And hey, I’m not saying these questions aren’t important to dissect, because they absolutely are.
What I am saying, rather, is that we need to put this life that we view as secure and stable and familiar under a microscope to see what it really looks like up close.
How do the following statements make you feel?
You turn 45, are married with two kids, and after dropping them both off at an expensive preschool, you have to drive to a job that makes you want to pull your hair out. You feel unfulfilled and find yourself wondering what your kids will think of you when they realize that their mother, while having a good life on paper, is deeply unsatisfied.
You’re married to a partner who is kind and loyal, but when you’re really honest with yourself, you know you’re not in love with them. You look at the marriages some of your closest friends have with their spouses and feel jealous of the bond they share and the sexual intimacy they have. You find yourself crying in the bathroom in the middle of the night wondering how you got to this place.
Do these scenarios scare the crap out of you? Because they should.
I want these potential outcomes to be far more fearful than the questions that fill your mind in this moment.
And guess what? They haven’t happened yet. You still have the power to prevent them from ever happening. But only you can choose.
What path will you take?
Tag. You’re it.
