Keeping Forward Momentum

Making changes in ourselves as a result of impactful experiences is great. Those changes are most likely to take long-lasting hold in ourselves and be welcomed by those who care about us, if we teach them how they can celebrate with us along our journey.

Today was my first day back in my regular role after serving a four-month work assignment. Learning new skills and getting know a lot of new people and taken on new roles can be hard. But they all can also be very exciting and exotic in a cool way. And so that’s a way that we can lean into the challenges with new environments and new experiences.

But going back to how things were before can pose its own challenges. It’s really easy to fall back in the exact mold we left behind, but hopefully we don’t exactly fit anymore because we’ve grown and have had different experiences that have taught us different things and different approaches. That’s a wonderful thing about being willing to get out of our comfort zone enough to try new things.

But it also means that we need to reinvent that mold and then reinforce the new self for the people around us, so they can learn how best to interact with the slightly different us. It’s not necessarily other people’s fault to expecting us to fill the same roles and behave in the same ways that we used to. It’s our job to provide others with opportunities to get to know us again with these changes.

I related this slight shifts to baking bread. If we don’t have the same ingredients that we used for the last batch, we certainly shouldn’t expect the same results when we combine other ingredients and bake those into the new bread. Some folks tasting the new bread, might prefer the old recipe, and personally I’ve found it helpful to listen to that constructive criticism because we’re all trying to figure out the best path forward and we can use all the help we can get. Many other folks will likely like the new recipe too.

The dangerous and less productive approach though, is to revert back to making the same bread, but with slightly different ingredients. There are some fabulous whole wheat bread recipes out there but if you try letting white flour rise as long as it takes to let whole wheat flour rise, you might end up with a ballon instead of a loaf.

All of that to say that making changes in ourselves as a result of impactful experiences is great. Those changes are most likely to take long-lasting hold in ourselves and be welcomed by those who care about us, if we teach them how they can celebrate with us along our journey. That way, we can explain our purpose behind changing our life recipe slightly and can enjoy the results together.