Unique Commonalities:
When the Fertilizer Hits the Rotating Air-Pusher
I was reading the other day that on the average, each person
experiences between two and three significant life changes (as self-reported)
during the course of a year. That is an astounding
figure to me. Yet, looking back on my
own life, I must admit that it is probably not that far off.
What is a significant life change? It is any change in socioeconomic, physical,
emotional or spiritual status, which requires significant changes in behavior,
thoughts, beliefs, and perspective, which impacts, to some degree, other areas
of life.
Yes, it is a mouthful.
Yet, you can simply define a significant life change event by how you
initially respond to it. Usually, the
greater the outcry, “The Fertilizer has Hit the Rotating Air-Pusher!” or “Holy Manure!”
and such similar things usually indicate that you have just experienced such a
life change. The more you think about it
afterward and the more stress it initially generates is also a great indicator.
One common characteristic of a SLC (Significant Life Change)
is that there is a shift. It can usually
be felt. The shift can be in the speed
of your thoughts, the depth of your emotion, the sudden change in perspective and
priorities. In each of these responses
there is a time, a moment, to manage better the affects of the change.
When an SLC occurs, oftentimes your thoughts speed up and
start processing all the aspects, real and imagined, of the change. This often happens before the emotions kick in. If left ungoverned, these thoughts can
trigger the emotional reaction of PANIC.
Yet, at the outset, you can govern some of these thoughts.
It takes a decision to start thinking not around or about
the issue, the change, but to start looking at it’s cause, it’s degree, and
most importantly, at your response to it.
Think one thought and then think another. If you find yourself dwelling only on the
cause of the change, you become trapped in your own mind. If you focus only on the degree, you promote
stress, anxiety and fear. Your mind
will try to analyze it. Your job is to
analyze it in a way that focuses on solutions; not necessarily solving the
change, but providing yourself some solutions in addressing it.
At some point, whether governing your thoughts or not, the
emotions will come into play. The shift
in emotions might feel exhilarating, or scary or both. You may find your emotions going as fast as your
thoughts did. You may even go through
the entire spectrum of your emotional repertoire in the space of a couple of
minutes. Emotions are ok to
experience. Yet, just like thoughts, if
they dwell in fear, anxiety, apathy, anger or frustration for a long time, they
can do damage. They can prime you to
experience those emotions more and more while going through this Significant
Life Change. Yet, unlike the fast
thoughts, emotions will need to be experienced to a point. Immediately bottling up frustration or anger
will cause those to come out in non-beneficial or destructive ways later
on. Managing the shift in emotions is
more about recognizing them, their validity, and setting a time in which they
can be experienced. If the life change is good, there needs to be time to
celebrate. If there is a negative life
change, there needs to be time to mourn, to grieve. If the change is confrontational and
threatening, anger, for a time, is perfectly appropriate. You can howl at the moon. Get it out.
Just don’t make a habit of that.
Do not let any one emotion create habits in your behavior that may
complicate addressing the life change(s) that have happened.
Once the mind and emotions have spoken, and sometime during,
there is a change in perspectives that happen during a Significant Life
Change. Up until the change, you had priorities
in your life: paying your bills, going
to work, looking for work, being a parent, or family member, taking care of
finances, education, scheduling social events, etc. We all do this. We all have an unspoken list of priorities,
labeled from most important to least. We
all get a little frustrated when we have to re-prioritize these. Yet, the SLC does more than force us to
reprioritize; it forces a whole new system on us. New items suddenly appear which trump in
importance anything else on our everyday list.
If the change involved financial hardship, suddenly there is a survival
priority written that puts the most necessary items on top. If the change is physical, new priorities in
health and healing, body image or body survival are created.
This is the stage where we do a reality check on our
priorities. We do have some choice on
what gets prioritized. Survival needs
usually are prioritized first. Even
positive life changes cause needs to be prioritized. Yet, when we are reordering that list, watch
out for those priorities, which no longer serve a purpose under the new
change. For example, if you are in a car
wreck and your car is totaled, one of your priorities that no longer work as
well is that priority to continue to put $300 away on that future Hawaii
vacation. Other things take
precedence. Emotional priorities are
even more difficult to tell which are still valid and which are not. If you break up with someone or are the
recipient of the breakup, the emotional priority to spend time with your
special someone is no longer valid. Yet,
if we keep that in the forefront of the priority list, it will cause more
frustration, pain, and loss.
When a Significant Life Change occurs, you will think
thousands of thoughts; you will feel thousands of emotions, or some emotions a
thousand times, and your perspective and priorities will change. These things will happen. Managing SLC’s and their negative effects include
managing each of these shifts. Don’t
worry. It gets easier (most of the time)
with every SLC experienced.
