We are always in change.
That sounds simple and even obvious. But most of us don’t actually live as though it’s true. We treat change as an event. It happens to us and we have to get through it, so we can return to normal. Or, change happens for the better and we wait to feel like a new person.
What we are offering here is that there is only moving through change. And that moving through change often changes us.
Change is the condition of life. It’s easy to intellectually understand this, but knowing it in your body and your relationships and your sense of self is what makes it possible to move through change without being undone by it.
The Gap is the Signal
Here is one way to recognize that you’re in change: you notice a gap.
The gap is that disorienting space between who you were and who you’re becoming. This new moment is asking something different from you. And this can feel like a gap between the version of yourself that felt solid and the version that hasn’t quite taken shape yet.
That gap is uncomfortable. It can feel like something is wrong, like you’ve lost your footing or like you should be further along than you are. What we’ve come to understand is that when you notice the gap, you are growing. The discomfort is evidence of motion and it’s likely you are being asked to gather information, learn new skills or make different choices.
What’s Actually Happening to You
When we’re in change, we tend to focus on what’s happening externally, like the shifting relationships or the altered expectations. We pay less attention to what’s happening inside us. But change is a full-body experience, and understanding it at that level is part of what makes it navigable.
Your nervous system is responding. Change activates the body’s stress response. Even change you’ve chosen, change you’ve wanted, registers as a disruption. Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish easily between a threat and a transition. It responds to uncertainty with alertness, and sometimes with alarm. This is simply biology, not necessarily a signal that something is wrong. When you understand that your physical response to change is a normal part of the process, you can work with it rather than against it.
Your neural pathways are being rewritten. The habits, patterns, and assumptions you’ve built over time are encoded in the brain. Change asks you to do things differently, which means building new pathways. This takes repetition, patience, and a tolerance for feeling clumsy before you feel competent. The discomfort of learning something new, of not yet being good at what the moment requires, is the feeling of your brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Your relationships are shifting. Change rarely happens in isolation. When you change, the people around you notice. Some will welcome it. Some will resist it. Some will need time to trust that the new version of you is still someone they know. This can be one of the more painful parts of change: the lag between who you’re becoming and who the people in your life are still expecting you to be.
Your identity is in motion. Perhaps most disorienting of all: change asks you to let go of who you were. Growth requires releasing some version of yourself to make room for what’s coming. That release can feel like loss, and in some ways, it is. Grieving who you were is a legitimate part of becoming who you’re growing into.
Even Wanted Change is Hard
We often expect that if we wanted the change, if we pursued it, then the transition should be smooth. When it isn’t, we wonder what’s wrong with us. Why are we struggling with something we asked for?
But change is disruptive by nature. It asks you to adapt, to learn, and to become someone you haven’t fully been yet. The fact that you wanted it doesn’t eliminate the disorientation. It just means you also have motivation to keep going.
Emotions Are Not the Enemy
In our work at Leverage to Lead, we understand deeply that emotions are fundamentally human. They are not obstacles as we navigate change, but data that can support us in understanding what we need in the change.
When we feel feelings during change (fear, resistance, grief, confusion, or even unexpected joy), those feelings are showing us any number of things:
- where we’re holding on too tightly
- where something matters deeply
- where a decision is waiting to be made
- where something needs to be grieved before we can move forward.
The goal is not to manage emotions out of the picture. The goal is to understand what they’re telling us and to have enough of a foundation in our own value and agency that we can use that information rather than be overwhelmed by it. This doesn’t always mean the feelings don’t linger. Part of navigating our feelings is also to take care of ourselves as we feel into them too.
That foundation is what makes the difference between suffering in change and moving through it.
You Are Not Behind
If you are in a gap right now, feeling somewhere between who you were and who you’re becoming, you are not behind. You are not broken. You are in the process.
Change is not a problem to be solved. It is something to be moved through, with as much clarity, support, and self-compassion as you can bring to it.
In our next post, we’ll look at the stages of change, the emotional responses that accompany each one, and the questions worth asking when you find yourself stuck.