I originally wrote this as a journal entry – the ‘you’ I’m addressing is a part of me. It felt more honest to keep it in this format rather than hide behind ‘we’ or ‘some people I’ve worked with’ – my hope is that others will recognise part of themselves in this too.
True change isn’t easy. We are all changing all of the time, but deep transformation – intentional, meaningful, profound change – takes courage.
Change won’t happen whilst the discomfort with the present is less than the fear of the future.
You’ll stay the same – comfortable with the discomfort of repeating the same patterns – safe in the known of what you’ve always done. Better to do what you’ve always done than trust yourself to take the risk of something brand new. You know or can sense that something else is possible, a new way of operating is available to you, but somehow it’s easier to stay doing what you always do.
You’ll find all sorts of reasons, subtle and not so subtle, rational and irrational. Some you’ll be conscious of, some will be hidden in your unconscious. All sorts of excuses for why you won’t change.
Other people will offer advice. They’ll be convinced this is just the change you need, the perfect opportunity for you, just the thing you’ve been waiting for. They’ll be sincere and genuinely believe in what they tell you.
The challenge is they believe in you more than you believe in yourself.
But you won’t change until the discomfort with the present exceeds the fear of the future.
You are running all sorts of adaptive strategies, reactive patterns that you learned to keep you safe. You might not even be aware of all of them. You can hide behind the age-old excuse – ‘it’s just the way I am’.
Those patterns, the intelligent strategies you needed to survive, run deep – they are in your head, your heart and in your hands. They are in mental, physical and behavioural patterns that make up your personality structure.
No amount of rational argument will convince you that something will be ‘fine’ if deep down in your bones you ‘know’ it isn’t safe for you.
Even if your mind buys into the idea, your heart and body will hold you back if they aren’t sure that you’ll be safe.
This is the realm of self-sabotage. The ‘perfect’ opportunity might be laid out in front of you, there for the taking, but somehow you let it slip away. Your heart and body are not in it and somehow, they pull you back.
Better to stay as you are than risk becoming something else.
This is the realm of the Chameleon – surface level of change might be possible, doing what it takes to fit and blend into the environment but fundamentally and deep down staying the same.
What sits beneath is the attachment patterns you learned in childhood – how you learned to be safe in your formative environment. How you survived and learned to thrive with the challenges and events of your past.
Your intelligence systems – your head, your heart and your gut – are predictability machines. They learn from the past and they are keen to prevent you repeating the pain and trauma you once felt or experienced.
You learned how to stay safe – playing big or playing small, proving or pleasing. Putting on the armour of your personality, hiding behind the mask of your particular persona. Disconnecting from your true self or essence, compromising your authentic self to be accepted and find the connection you needed that would allow you to survive.
You hid your vulnerability and fear behind the character you learned to play.
You are not alone. Most people are doing some version of this. This is the human experience. The great thing is that you can learn to see it. You can learn to recognise these patterns and learn to make different choices.
You became the perfectionist, the challenger, the achiever, the pleaser, the caretaker, the dreamer – whatever blend of strategies were most effective. Doing whatever it took to stay safe; to avoid the fears of ridicule, rejection and rupture.
Most people stay with what they know – it worked in the past and it still works in the present. They play around with their behaviours but in their minds, they stay the same. They remain like the Chameleon. Too scared to make the deeper changes that would allow them to access their highest potential. The discomfort with the present isn’t great enough to overcome the fear of the future.
So, how do you make the change at this deeper level? How do you be like the Caterpillar and transform to become the Butterfly?
There are a couple of choices – increase the discomfort of the present or reduce the fear of the future.
You can create a crisis, find an emergency, make things so bad that you have to change. This will force you into action, but the danger is that once the danger passes, once the emergency is over, you will slowly return to what you know and the old patterns will return.
You can seek the big cathartic release, hoping to shock yourself into change. But those seismic events can be overwhelming and re-traumatise the system, the rebound only further cementing the old patterns.
The more effective way to increase the discomfort with the present is to begin to explore the cost of staying the same. To explore the little ways that you hold yourself back, the limitations you place on yourself, the things that you miss out on. To begin to notice the cage you might be keeping yourself in. To begin to feel the weight of the armour you are carrying.
You are not broken, yet there are opportunities you are missing out on.
There are new adventures and possibilities available to you, new connections to make.
This is not about losing your edge, it is about gaining a choice.
Freeing yourself from reactive habits and patterns and being able to choose a different response.
You can learn to reduce the fear of the future. Lean into it, find the edge of your comfort zone. Stay with the fear a little longer each time.
Your system was designed to protect you.
If something felt unsafe or a difficult emotion was present – fear, anger, sadness or even joy – then a secondary emotion may have appeared – shame, embarrassment, guilt, overwhelm or anxiety – causing you to do something to protect yourself – to numb, suppress, deny, hide or avoid feeling into that discomfort.
Your personality structure contains all the things you learned to do to prevent being with that difficult emotion.
To allow change to take place you have to lean into those emotions. To feel into the fear, sadness, anger and joy. To surrender into it and to be with whatever is there.
This is emotional intelligence as resilience. To recognise, regulate, resource and recover from the challenges of allowing yourself to experience these emotional states.
To pendulum – into the emotion and back out again.
To titrate – to take it in small doses, to build up your tolerance.
To be able to move into and through the discomfort at a pace that allows you to process what was left unprocessed from your past.
Coaching alone won’t help you. Talk therapy will only take you so far.
This is somatic work – coming out of the mind and into the body.
You can’t use the mind to overcome the mind.
Reducing the fear of change to support your transformation is about allowing yourself to feel what you’ve been too scared to feel. It’s about stepping through the shame, guilt or embarrassment to discover what’s on the other side.
Your mind will resist. You will convince yourself there is another way. Your mind will become super rational, it will see everything as black or white, it will convince you that it’s right and anything else is wrong.
This is the edge. When you move from tolerating shades of grey to insisting on one side of a polarity or the other, when it absolutely has to be ‘this’ and couldn’t possibly be ‘that’. When you develop convincing arguments of why you should stay exactly as you are and never change. This is a sign of fear.
These are moments to check in. To use the power of Byron Katie’s questions:
“Is it true?”
“Is it absolutely true?”
“What happens when you believe that thought?”
“Who could you be without that thought?”
Any examination of the present truth reveals that change is always happening, nothing ever stays the same, however much we are attached to it. The good things as well as the bad things will pass. We are all getting older; night will follow day no matter how much we want to stay in the sun; the tide will come in no matter how much power we think we have.
To be an active agent of change, to become the fullest expression of who you are, requires you to find the edge of your fear, to lean into the discomfort and play with whatever you find there.
True emotional intelligence requires self-compassion – to develop the compassion and love that allows you to see the bits that you’ve hidden away. To love those parts of you that you learned to believe were not enough, too much, unworthy, undeserving or unlovable.
All parts of you need to be seen, heard and understood.
To feel safe, welcome, celebrated and cherished.
Only then will you trust yourself to overcome the fear of the future.
But to be seen, heard and understood you need to show up and speak your truth.
This is true courage – to feel it in your body, to let your system experience the rawness of those emotions – to feel the fear and still lean in. To open your heart, to let it speak its truth, and to feel what was once too scary to feel.
Then you are ready for meaningful change. Then transformation is possible.
Then you are on your way to becoming the Butterfly.
Be Courageous. Reclaim Your Potential. Shape Your Future.
Clear view 