Dealing with change: Could your comfort zone be making you uncomfortable?
I’m not sure if change is the enemy or comfort is? We have all been there, we lose our job, our partner leaves us, you move to another town and of course the fact that nothing ever is NOT changing. What is it about change that makes us so fearful? Is it that we are so protective of our comfort or is it that comfort has made us soft to the wonders of change − why can’t change be comfortable and comfort changeable?
I have often pondered this dilemma, if you will, and I have some conclusions and ideas around the notion of change.
What is it that comfort, also referred to as certainty, gives us? For starters it gives us certainty; certainty means we have control and aren’t likely to be thrown into a situation where we might not know what to do.
Comfort is familiar, it’s secure and we know every nook and cranny of our comfort zone, which gives us some relief and reduced stress or difficulty.
How comfortable can we be if we are at the mercy of our comfort, and the minute something shatters this comfort we go to bits? Wasn’t our comfort once an uncertainty, an unknown too?
Change, even when it feels excruciating, I believe, is life’s way of saying, “have a pit stop and think about how you would like things to be now; what changes and amendments would you like to make?”
Sometimes change is unwanted, but we must deal with it. The truth is, even when change is unwanted, it’s an opportunity to evolve into something better. Coping with change, I think, is a shift in mindset. We can see it as something scary, unknown, full of uncertainty or not; we could see it as opportunity and a breather.
Change may feel uncomfortable, but if you are here reading this, have you not survived it? Have you not learned and grown from it? And just maybe you are in a better place than before the change occurred.
8 practical tips for dealing with change
1. Don’t over think it, understand why it has occurred but don’t let your imagination take over. It’s very easy for the mind to over embellish things.
2. Consider the positives to have come from this change. There will always be positives, you may just have to look a little harder sometimes.
3. Start making a list of things that are in your control that you can start putting into action to regain your stability.
4. Consider how you would like things to be and what you would like to be doing moving forward.
5. What are some of the mistakes that have occurred previously that you can learn from and make positive adjustments with?
6. Make time for some learning and meditation and journal your thoughts.
7. Make time to hang out with trusted friends and get out of your head for a bit.
8. Move, move, move, take action and do not procrastinate; make your to-do list, your action plan and run with it.
I can’t promise you that change will ever be painless. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it will hurt, but how much it does or doesn’t depends on whether we seek to latch onto the certainty of a comfort no longer in our lives or surrender to the certainty of change and all the good it can bring us.
By Petros Galanoulis – Dip Life Coaching, Vedanta Studies.
