Why Change is Good

I’m here to talk to you today about why this big CHANGE you just made by moving overseas is the best thing you could have done for yourself. 

You might not yet be in a place to believe me. When I first moved overseas to Berlin, I found it exciting, because I was looking at the experience like a tourist visiting a new city. But you can’t be a tourist forever. Eventually I became obsessed with all the things I had given up. Sometimes I was obsessed with the little things, like the tiny freezers, the fact that I couldn’t buy maple syrup, the strange cultural habits. 

One day I was waiting to cross the street. There were a few other people waiting next to me. Although the walk indicator had not come on yet, there were clearly NO cars in sight anywhere. Therefore I stepped off the sidewalk and began to cross the street. A complete stranger grabbed me by my backpack and pulled me back onto the sidewalk. I wanted to punch this person. I didn’t speak enough German at the time to even yell at them. I didn’t understand what they were yelling at me either, thank goodness. I spent the day with this rage inside of me and looked for more indicators of how Germans were just plain wrong. When my German husband came home from work, I told him my story in complete outrage only to find out that Germans wait for the crosswalk to ensure they are not bad influences on children who are still learning the rules. He said sometimes, if there is no one else around, Germans will cross against the light, but usually, they wait.

I finally realized that these little CHANGES were not really the problem. The big CHANGES I had made were my problem. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t working, I was a foreigner, and I struggled to understand what was going on because I didn’t know the language. These three big CHANGES along with the CHANGE of now being married, left me feeling so uncomfortable, so unsure of myself, so frustrated, and so helpless. Those feelings were the real problem that I had to tackle.

The reason why most people don’t CHANGE, is because we don’t want to do hard things. We don’t want to be uncomfortable. What’s the point of being uncomfortable when you can just stay the same?

By moving overseas, I didn’t have a choice any longer. I was going to have to face the uncomfortable feelings brought about by CHANGE. How do we make sense of being willing to be uncomfortable and also being at peace and being happy in our lives and inviting that discomfort in? One of my answers is you have to find a way that discomfort actually becomes part of the pleasure you enjoy in your life.

That sounds totally opposite of what could be true, but for me, it has become the answer to living the most fulfilled life. It’s almost like when you first start lifting weights and it’s awful. If you haven’t been lifting weights or you haven’t been to a yoga class or you haven’t gone to an aerobics class, it’s awful.

It’s so uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel right. There’s no result. You lift for an hour and the only result you have is pain. You don’t even look any better yet. You just want to quit immediately. You’re like, what is the point of lifting this heavy thing that makes me sore for the next three days? That doesn’t make any sense.

But the more you embrace the discomfort of it, the more you plan it, the more you know that it’s part of the deal, then you start looking forward to that hard workout that’s going to hurt so good. Once you get into shape, you’re like, “I’m going to go lift heavy today. I’m going to be sore tomorrow.”

There’s an ounce of pleasure in it, even though it’s hard. That’s what life is like when you start focusing the value of your life on becoming someone who grows and takes your potential to where it can go.

To embrace discomfort and growth and be who you want to be in the world is a huge thrill. It’s way more exciting than watching someone else have an amazing life on TV. But there’s a price to pay, of course. You have to pay the price of discomfort.

So it’s just like the workout. You know it’s going to be hard to lift those weights, you know it’s going to be hard to find new friends, you know it’s going to be hard to learn a new language, but you look forward to the discomfort because you love what’s on the other side of that, and that becomes your new thrill in life.

Why is that so challenging for us? Our brain loves what’s familiar because what is familiar is safe. That’s when we feel comfortable. Familiarity feels comfortable to us. We love the instant gratification. Our brain is wired for reward. It’s wired to avoid pain.

We have all these pleasures, all these rewards around us all the time. Of course, we want them, that’s what we’re wired for. That’s so much more compelling in the moment than the long-term goal. It’s so much more compelling to lay on the couch right now than it is to lift a weight because lifting that weight isn’t going to give us anything good until about six weeks from now.

And laying on the couch eating chocolate is super pleasurable right now. Our brain has a bias to right now. Let’s take care of what we want, which is comfort and pleasure and avoidance of pain right now.

So we dis-empower ourselves by disconnecting from our emotions, by disconnecting from our body, which just wants to solve with pleasure. Then we beat ourselves up for doing it and feel terrible about it, and that causes us to go seek more pleasure. 

What I’m suggesting is that you CHANGE that, even though it’s hard. The discomfort that you have when you’re growing is different than the discomfort you have from not fulfilling your potential, not doing what you most want to do.

I want you to think about CHANGE from this perspective. In this moment, all the possibilities for your life exist. The person you want to be, the person you want to be with, the things you want to accomplish. All of those potentials exist.

If you haven’t taken the time to consider those possibilities, I want you to make sure that you take that time. What is possible for your life abroad? I’m not saying you have to go and do it. But of all the possibilities available to you, I want you to consider your options. You have so many. Now, when you start to do this, when you start to consider CHANGE, when you start to consider possibilities, your brain will say stay focused on what’s possible based on the past. Try thinking about what’s possible based on the future.

Your brain is programmed to get its possibilities from the past. But your brain has the ability to create possibility from the future, and that’s where I want you to go. So if I ask you what is possible for your life, don’t tell me about your past. I don’t care where you went to school, what you did, where you lived.

None of it matters. None of it. All that matters right now is what’s possible for you in the future. And if you’re willing to go through the process of CHANGE, which is very difficult, you can proceed with your life from your future possibility, and that’s what will blow your mind.

When you look at your life, how much time are you spending thinking about your past? How much time are you spending complaining about your present? Because that’s what you’re going to create. Those thoughts are all optional. But when you spend a lot of time thinking about the future you are creating in this moment, then that is what you create. It takes practice, and it is uncomfortable, but we need to spend more time thinking about possibility and less time thinking about what is and what is our past if we want to CHANGE.

Don’t underestimate how hard that is, letting go of being a person who has a full-time career, a person with a strong social network, and re-identifying yourself overseas.

Everything in your brain’s going to scream and tell you to go back to being the person who was comfortable and familiar. You must study yourself to truly get to know yourself. From this awareness, you can determine what you want and what you don’t want. Then you can go about the deliberate discomfort of CHANGING your life on purpose.

CHANGE requires believing in something beyond evidence. You have to keep your thoughts, feelings, and actions on the result you want and not the result that you have.

One of the things that creates, I think, the fastest transformations is the willingness to take full responsibility, to understand that every single result you have in your life is where you had a purpose and took some action. You will resist this knowing, you will resist owning a lot of your results because you will want to think that the circumstances caused it, or that you had no control. But if you see your life being at the effect of what is happening out there in the world, you will always struggle to try and CHANGE the world.

And that does not work. You do not CHANGE the world and then CHANGE  yourself. You CHANGE yourself and then the world CHANGES. That’s the only way it’s ever worked. 

So CHANGE  is hard because it requires us to be aware, it requires us to be uncomfortable. It requires us to give up and sacrifice the life we had, the thoughts we have now, the beliefs we have now for the life we want to have, which means we have to completely obliterate our identity over and over and over again.

Might as well blow your own mind and be super proud and see the power of your mind take hold. Make the CHANGE that you want to see. Be that CHANGE, really, be it right now because why not.

So CHANGE is hard but who cares? Do it anyway.