InsightThere is a tiredness from change that I feel is not talked about much at all. The kind that comes from still showing up for your team, your clients, your family, lets face it, all the people who need the version of you that feels most like yourself. Yet here you are in change. A change that is currently transforming who you are becoming, so their ask and your desire to show up as yourself becomes a little harder. Especially when you are in what I call the uncertainty gap where you are not who you used to be, yet not who you are becoming. So you tend to hold on to both and this is where exhaustion comes. When you and I try to hold on to both versions of ourselves everyday, with the aim of speaking up and showing up with confidence, this is one of the hardest things to do. This holding on to both makes us carry more weight, and this contributes to keeping us stuck in the uncertainty gap. We really need to release both so we can move through this gap. So WhatWhen you feel this weight or pressure which leads to exhaustion, you may be holding on to both versions of yourself. Doing this while going through change and showing up as confidently as you can is an ask you and I were not meant to carry, and if we decide to carry it, it is not sustainable. It burns through our energy so deeply. When we decide to release both versions of ourselves, we have energy to let our curiosity flow freely, and we can freely explore, adapt, and experiment. This is what enables us to be ourselves as we figure out who we are becoming during the change. It grows our communication skills. It opens us up to be courageous, and each step we take through the uncertainty that change brings, well. It delivers something we were not expecting. The missing pieces of who we are becoming. Change does not just challenge who we are. When we decide to move through it, it completes us. And guess what?In change you may have to do some things alone but you are not alone. For me, for over a decade, I felt change pressing its foot down more heavily on the gas pedal, accelerating the pace of it every year. I found it hard to keep my head above water. I was burning out and burning relationships from being unsure of how to handle the stress it brought. Many times I was shaken by the way change shifted my identity in different settings, faster each year, making it harder to figure out who I was amongst it all. Life was progressing well, please don’t get me wrong, but the weight and confusion of this while displaying confidence and striving for results, gee, it burnt through my energy way too quickly. This flowed into other areas of my life too and I became so sick of the fear and doubt crowding my mind. The more I coached and spoke to people while growing Blossoming Speaker, the more I realised I was not alone in this. If you relate to any of these things, well I guess this is my opportunity to tell you that you are not isolated in feeling or experiencing any of these things either. So I became open to my courage to relaunch the Blossoming Speaker Podcast. It was something always in my heart to do but I stopped for the very reasons I now am passionate about helping others keep going through. Because change is one of the most disorientating and fearful experiences a person can go through, even the good and positive changes. Most of the time we go through it by chance without language for what we are feeling and experiencing. With a feeling of loneliness without someone who genuinely understands it and craving some sort of support to help get through. This podcast aims to give you the words for the experience, the company of someone who has lived it and chooses to go through it, and the encouragement to keep moving through it with more of yourself intact. So please check out the first episode…ah, well, it’s actually episode zero and titled, Welcome, this one’s for you. I’d love your support getting the work out about it so please share it with everyone you know :-) Below is a link to Spotify to listen to it, but you can also find it across other podcast services. A new episode will be released each week.
All the best, Susan. P.S. Please keep an eye out for the training membership coming up. |
If you are feeling stuck or bound by fear, you may be in the uncertainty gap. That's what I call the place between who you were and who you are becoming. Restructures live there. Career pivots live there. New leadership, new industries, new technology, all of it lands people in that gap, and most are told to just "adjust." I don't do adjust. I do redirect: taking the fear that uncertainty triggers and turning it straight into courage to communicate. It's a way through so you may realise the new version of you, that you are becoming...and with confidence along the way.
Insight. A blank mind isn’t broken, it is actually asking you a question. “Can we pause for a moment?” Most of the time our mind feels tired, overloaded, anxious, or knocked off course by something unexpected. It is rarely out of ideas about what to say or how to respond. So What? Trying to think harder is actually making it worse because you are trying to solve the wrong question. The way through isn’t more effort. It is noticing what’s actually going on underneath first. I take this...
Insight. It’s the moments that catch you off guard, an unexpected reply, a joke that lands strangely, someone putting us on the spot in front of a group, that feels like our self-worth is being tested. But it is not. It tests our recovery, not our worth. So What? No one expects you to have the perfect line loaded and ready. What people actually remember isn’t the moment that caught you off guard, it's how you found your footing again straight after. Finding your footing is not about an...
Insight. Fear of speaking up doesn’t just make you feel nervous, it may make you blind. Sounds drastic I know but most of the time we do not notice we have blind spots because of the fears we carry. When you’re afraid or nervous about having a conversation, an interview, or to lead a presentation, your mind spends so much energy managing the fear that it has minimal energy left over for noticing what’s actually in front of you. Your opportunity is usually still there, you’ve just quietly...