Now that we’ve elected Donald Trump as the next president of the United States you may be feeling fear and anxiety, or joy and relief, or a range of other emotions. Whatever you feel, as a result of this change in the direction of our country, it will be important to be with our emotions from a place of non-judgment.
Maria and I have both been writing about change (here, here and here) while we’ve been undergoing huge life changes of our own. We are now coming out on the other end of those changes. We’re settling into our new life in Atlanta, just two months from the time we made the decision to move here. We’ve jettisoned more than 60% of our possessions, watched our now young adult children move off to other ends of the country, left behind clients, friends and community to start anew in a big city.
Of course the changes are still coming, as every store we enter, every new business relationship we initiate, every time we navigate the unfamiliar city streets of A-town, we are discovering and exploring new things. And still we are settling in with the changes, which means we are being with the emotions that come with change.
Anticipation of these emotions is precisely why we tend to avoid change as much as we do. We don’t want to feel like a fish out of water, or the uncertainty of new things, or the “what if’s” of how things will work out. We want to know (with some measure of precision) how the future will unfold.
And yet, being in a place of uncertainty, with all the emotions that that brings up, is one of the most powerful places to be. It gives us the ability to look upon things with fresh eyes, to create anew, to innovate, to pivot, and to dance a new dance. What holds us back from embracing change is judging our emotions.
Being in a place of non-judgment of all that we feel related to change is how we carry ourselves through to a potentially brighter and more interesting future. That means being with whatever fears we may be experiencing, silly as they may seem or rooted in logic and experience. Either way, if we can just feel the fear, the anxiety, the sense of not having our sea legs, without placing a label on it or having an opinion about it will enable us to move through the fear, which is precisely the place in which creativity and innovation blossom.
So I invite you to feel the fear and follow your intuition toward change and a brighter future.
