I started offering the Creating Clients Challenge a while back now just after I’d moved back to New Zealand. I’d lived away for 16 years and it was a big change. Not long before that my marriage had ended and I’d sold the home I’d created spent 7 years creating . I turned 40 and then some.
The Challenge started as a game, really. It seemed so easy to post a tip every day, and it was getting really great engagement. I was excited to see the growth and value people got from it from both the community and what I was sharing.
Then it became less fun, and more work. I was trying to build my business in this country, i was house siting and constantly on the move. I was getting to know people and a place I thought I once knew. After a while I just stopped. It wasnt like I meant to, it just happened. Nothing happend, and the more I pushed myself to make offers and complete the challenge, and do all that great stuff I love, I just couldn’t do it. My creativity, my motivation, and my focus had disappeared. Whenever I tried to start up again and finish writing the challenge, all I felt was anxiety, exhaustion, shame and unease. So I stopped and I left it. I took time out to just be. To eat well, to exercise and to retreat .
I didn’t keep in touch with friends in the UK, I didn’t arrange to catch up with people i knew here in NZ. I’m not really sure what I did but it allowed me time to recalibrate into who I was becoming.
I thought it was burnout, a natural assumption having hit several major life changes.
This explanation isn’t helpful, it feels stagnant to me. A bit like getting flu, feeling ill then, recovering right back to where you were to the old normal.
A more generative way of looking at this is that it was part of the natural human change process.
That to become who we need to be, in order to live the life we want, we need to evolve to who now we are. Socioloigist Martha Beck calls this becoming gloop – like the caterpillar who becomes gloopy as it transfoms into a butterfly.
I just glooped around for 6 months or so.
I’m sharing this because I believe that to be able to do something different, we need to become a someONE different. Not someone else, just a different version of us. A bit of an upgrade. Not necessarily better, just better suited to where we are in our lives right now – what we want to do, be, and experience. When it comes to our work we tend to think of it as our knowledge or skills that we need to change, that it’s an academic shift. However what I’ve found is that the change is deeper than that, it’s a shift in the way we see, the way we look, the way we understand, and the way behave.
This transformation takes energy, and it happens in its own time. It seems right to see this as simply part of the transformational process.
In the next post I explain the four stages of change we go through using my own experience as an example