How Do You Best Pivot to a New Thing?
Episode 2 – Journey to Confidence
How do you best pivot to a new thing?
Are you asking this question of yourself right now? Do you need to make a transition in your life from one job to another, from one city to another, one relationship to another, or perhaps even one sense of identity to another?
If so, you’re in the right place.
That’s the question that my friend John and I are asking each other in the beginning stages of our parallel journey from one profession to another. As we use our specific circumstances to explore some key aspects of making change, we’re discovering principles that can be usefully applied to any type of major life transition.
These posts are part of an ongoing series we’ll be hosting, providing a window into our personal experience to help you with a transition of your own if you’re in the middle of one.
A Therapist Becomes a Musician
John has served as a therapist for the last 15-years and now seeks to rekindle a past love and vocation as a musician. Having earned a living playing with a band earlier in his life, he’s now exploring the world of creating and selling music online, the medium necessary for him both because of the current pandemic as well as his commitment to remain close to home with his family.
A Juggler Becomes a Corporate Speaker and Writer
I’ve made my living as a speaker and entertainer for live events for the last 40 years. I’ve also written several books, which has definitely helped my speaking career tremendously. Direct financial earnings from my writing, however, has been a tiny percentage of income I’ve derived from live presentations, and I, too, am attempting to educate myself on the use of digital tools to make a living online as a writer and confidence coach.
Last Week’s Change Tips
Last week, John and I identified 3 habits important to anyone who is in a transition phase.
Plan to take breaks in the midst of your mission.
Make sure information gathering is balanced by action.
Ask if you’re leaving a part of yourself behind.
If you’d like to see the detail of each of these practices, you can refer to last week's post.
The most provocative of these 3 points for both of us was considering what part of ourselves we want to make sure we bring along into our new ventures.
How We Implemented Last Week’s Practices
In the last week, John took the opportunity to explore some of his family history. With roots in Hawaii, his current home, he did some research into the meaning of his surname and its roots in both a Spanish and Portuguese heritage. John spoke of the sense of continuity this created for him, especially in discovering a connection to a lineage of healers in his family line. This connected some dots for John, realizing that a transition from his role as a therapist to his new career as a musician remained rooted in his desire to provide a healing atmosphere to others, and that now he would be doing this through the lens of music rather than traditional therapy.
Similarly, having presented at live events for so long prior to the disappearance of that opportunity in the pandemic, I realized that wanting to make my living as a writer was an extension of the same core purpose that drove my speaking career: the desire to deliver useful distinctions and tools to people who want consistent growth in their lives—in short, to be a teacher.
In both cases, John and I discovered that the pivot we’re attempting to make is not as much of a big scary jump into something entirely new as we thought. Instead, we both seem to be naturally evolving our skill sets as we seek to continue to serve others in way that has been meaningful for us all along.
John intends to bring his inner healer along in his transition, and I intend to bring my passion for teaching.
This led us to consider a new set of useful practices for making a big transition.
Practices for Week 2 in Journey to Confidence
Investigate All or Nothing Thinking
John observed how frequently he encounters clients in his practice who assume some very big change is needed in order to address their challenges. “But this is usually not the case,” John noted, “More often than not, the shift that people need to make is a small one, not a massive departure from their current state.”
Dichotomous thinking, or in psychological terms “splitting,” is the propensity to see things all one way or the other. “I need to change everything” or “I shouldn’t change anything” are simplistic conclusions that are seldom helpful in frames of growth.
Dr David Gorski is an MD and surgical oncologist who advocates thoughtfully for critical thinking. His recent article in sciencebasedmedicine.org touches on the challenges of going beyond dichotomous thinking. He states,
“Unfortunately, humans don’t deal well with uncertainty. Our tendency towards dichotomous thinking leads us to think that if we’re not absolutely certain about something, then we must not know anything.”
While this way of processing experience may be more or less exaggerated for different people, it can become more pronounced in anyone facing anxiety about their future. Since transitions are anxiety producing, it’s a pitfall we can all be mindful of in times of dramatic change.
We can remind ourselves that the changes we need to make may only be slight, and that even a small “pivot” can make a big difference, especially if implemented over time.
An airplane headed overseas, for example, makes a multitude of course corrections in flight, consisting of ongoing minute adjustments of the plane’s rudder. On any given average flight an airplane is “off course” 99% of the time, constantly adjusting and correcting to reach its destination successfully.
Takeaway: Make a list of any major life changes you’ve been considering, and identify one small adjustment you could implement instead to support a needed change.
Make Sure You Have Enough Stability to Transition
I asked John from his experience as a mental health caregiver, what he would say to someone facing questions of survival, immediate safety, or financial emergency. I asked what advice he might have about the wisdom of making small adjustments for those who require urgent change.
John’s answer was to match your level of need to the level of help. If you are actually in a survival situation where your own health, safety, or sanity, or that of a family member is in jeopardy, then call 911 or find the level of professional support that you require. Trying to follow self-help models or implement a do-it-yourself solution in an emergency circumstance is not a way to successfully transition to stable ground.
It may seem like a contradiction but transitions actually require stability and resources to be successful.
If you’re currently in a job that you need to leave, you’ll need to be able to pay your rent or your mortgage while you search for a new position or get a new business up and running. If you don’t have enough saved up to see you through, taking an exciting leap might not be the right thing in the moment. You might have to wait and build up that savings account. Or look for your new job while keeping your old one. If your change involves moving from your old home to a new city where you know no one, planning ahead about who your support team will be—so you have access to the right friends, mentors, family or good counsel—is a necessary component of your stability.
· Do you have the right relationship support to start a new business, deal with a health issue, or leave your current partner (if that is a real necessity)?
· Is your health stable enough to support working 16-hour days in the first year of a new landscape business?
· Is your marriage solid enough to cut your monthly budget in half while you work half-time so you can find a new job?
We tend to underestimate the amount of time needed to make large life changes. Getting settled into new jobs, locations, relationships or circumstances requires a significant amount of support. Part of the stability we need is self-compassion and perseverance combined with patience. If we’re demanding fast results from ourselves, we may in fact achieve what appears to be accelerated change, but beneath the surface we may be incurring other costs that will undermine everything we’ve worked for.
Working in a horticultural center years ago, John learned that Miracle Gro potting soil will indeed speed the process of plant growth, but that it depletes the soil and can deform the plant in the process.
Too much large-scale change is difficult to support and sustain. Slow and gradual change is easier to implement and tends to be more enduring.
Takeaway: Transitions require money, time, relationships, attention, and energy to occur with stability. Take inventory of all of these accounts and where needed, replenish them before you leap, or make a plan for how you’ll work with a deficit in any of those categories.
Resist the Allure of Going Beyond the Fundamentals
I asked John how we could know what to focus on in terms of practical action once we’ve clearly established the parts of ourselves we want to bring along.
John advised anyone in the midst of a big change to “resist the allure of going beyond the fundamentals.”
John related his young years as a skateboarder, growing up immersed in the skateboard culture of California. He likened facing a big change to learning how to skate in a half-pipe, the steep wooden or concrete ramps we’ve all seen extreme sports participants navigate masterfully (or painfully) on various wheeled apparatus.
If you start at the top of a half-pipe and try to ride what is basically a vertical drop into the trench and then come out on the other side, you’re probably going to get hurt. The level of intensity and potential energy that is involved in riding the steepest parts of the pipe are beyond our initial capacity. Learning to navigate those higher levels of the pipe comes from starting at the bottom and working your way up instead of starting at the top and dropping down. At the base, you gradually master the body mechanics that allow you to create momentum to ascend the slopes and eventually ride out at the top. It’s a natural and much safer way to transition to a new environment and capacity.
John reached out to a few professional musicians already successfully selling music at bandcamp.com and asked for advice on what fundamentals he should be prioritizing right now. The answer was clear and obvious. Make good music every week. It doesn’t have to be great music, or perfect music, but it has to be good music. This advice was like a rudder for John to steer by as he got confirmation that spending a ton of time on marketing copy, images, or platform development online won’t make any difference if you’re not focused on musical competence.
The fundamentals for me involve two things: creating good writing and sharing it with others. The creating part is no problem, it’s when it comes time to share that I get bogged down in fear that what I’m sharing will be irrelevant or ignored.
My leverage point out of that cage of fear goes back to something John mentioned last week about the power of empathy. John’s observation for himself was that his sense of fear about his offering and his process was dissipated by placing his attention on others. That resonates with me and I feel an immediate release from some of my self-concern when I think about the number of people out there who are facing big change in their lives and could use some support.
So here I am, thinking about writing something that might be helpful to you, my fellow transitioner, and sharing it in case it might help you succeed in your leap.
Takeaway: Find someone who has made the leap you’re in the middle of and ask them what fundamentals you should be paying attention to, then discipline yourself to stick with them, even when you want to leap onboard some shiny new plan, idea, possibility or distraction.
Check back next week for Episode 3, week 3 of our Journey to Confidence conversation.