Managing the emotional toll of internal and external voices

My yoga teacher once told me he’s tired of hearing that people never change:

“People only change, that’s all they do.”

Assuming that’s true, then the question each of us must ask ourselves is:

Will we get out in front of the change and reinvent ourselves proactively, or will we wait around for the whirlwind of the world to knock us to our knees and then shake things up?

My thought is, well, we’re going to change either way, so we may as well take the path that makes us feel the most powerful.

The thorny part will be managing the emotional toll of internal and external voices along the way. Because not everybody will be accepting and supportive of our reinvention efforts. Doing so may alter the dynamic of other people’s relationships with us, and that may deepen our own feelings of guilt.

And so, the only thing we can do is trust that we’re changing for the better, and trust that the people who love us will learn to love our changes too.

Besides, the upside of reinvention is, it doesn’t have to be a revolution. It’s not like we’re replacing the foundation of our very soul and starting over from scratch.

We’re merely creating new dimensions and making new additions to the facility. Hell, it could be as simple as a change in attitude and posture.

Becoming less obsessed over the big wins of our career and more motivated to be blessed by the little things in life, that was certainly not an insignificant change for me. Made me feel like a completely different person.

It all depends on how we talk to ourselves about it, and how we allow other people to talk to us about it.

Godin said that our posture regarding the process of change was far more important than the actual change itself.

If it’s true that people only change, that that’s all they do, then we may as well be more intentional about it. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Will you rest on your prior successes, or drive purposeful transformation?