I was in conversation with a client the other day, who’s looking to change career. (I know how this feels – I’ve done it many a time!)
It’s a time of great uncertainty.
Now, you know what sits atop the list of things-a-mind-doesn’t-like?
That’s right: uncertainty.
And you know what a mind does when it’s faced with uncertainty?
That’s right: it makes stuff up. Lots of stuff! In fact, the more uncertainty there is, the more gaps it feels it has to fill, and the more stuff it makes up.
Nightmare.
Now, it’s good to spot the sorts of things it makes up, so you can identify each of them as a work of fiction and not take them too seriously. Here are three, to be going on with:
First thing
The first is that this is all on you. That somehow you’re in control of the process.
You’re really not. The notion of control is a trick of the mind.
Don’t believe me? Well, take any life situation you find yourself in now, and tell me how much control you had in getting there. Family, friendships, tragedies, work situations… you don’t choose any of that stuff. It just happens.
When you’re moving in a particular direction, life, wisdom, the Universe, whatever you want to call it, has cogs that are turning in the background, presenting you with opportunity and help and guidance, in the form of happenstance, friendly guides and intuition.
As Michael Neill puts it, it’s:
“100% reliable and 98% unpredictable.”
Second thing
The second is our old favourite: predicting the future.
The mind is an algorithmic machine that takes the data it already has (the past/your conditioning), runs it through its programming and spits out what it thinks is the most likely outcome.
Problem is, it doesn’t know about the First thing (at all!), so it’s working off a very limited dataset. The volume of:
- stuff you don’t know
- things that could potentially happen, and
- insights you’ve yet to have
…is so unfathomably vast, it’s enough for that poor little Thought System 📦 of yours to explode… so it sticks to what it knows.
Which is nothing, in comparison.
Add to that the mind’s inbuilt negativity bias (a hangover from the tribal days, where physical safety was the #1 priority) and you’ve got yourself a majorly depressing blockbuster, playing in your head, 24/7.
None of which is true.
Third thing
This one’s the least obvious of the three, and it’s what I worked on with my client. It’s that the mind has no idea that wisdom is contextual.
What does that mean?
Well, imagine you’re in a position where you’re changing direction, wanting to create a different experience of life. You know change is coming, but you don’t know how that change is going to manifest.
What does the mind do?
It looks to how other people have made changes and it panics, because it thinks that you’re going to have to do the same things that they have: quit a job completely and wing it; move to a different country; somehow be single, without financial commitments again, when in reality you have a family and mortgage.
(In my experience, this sort of mental trickery is what really stops people from making the changes they want to.)
But wisdom is contextual. All the magic that’s going to happen, that can’t be predicted—the opportunities, the serendipities, the insights, the great ideas—that’s all going to happen in a way that’s perfect for YOU.
You’ll find YOUR way… when you get out of neutral and you start moving.
🏃🏻♂️
I’ll finish with the famous Jospeh Campbell quote I used to share, back when my thing was speaking about career change at big conferences:
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you, step by step, you know it's not your path.
Your own path you make with every step you take.”
Rest assured, change will show up in a way that’s right for you.
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft