When the music shifts from one tempo to another, the dance shifts with it. On the dance floor, you find your rhythm and pace, then the music changes. Next step: stumbling. Our lives are filled with ups and downs, rhythms and cycles, starts and stops. Each transition presents a new tempo. Each shift launches within us a new set of uncertainties. Here’s the good news: there is something about the shake up of a transition that has the potential to bring more out of us, but only if we keep dancing.
Transitions can be positive, negative or somewhere in between, sudden, long-time coming, or completely obvious. All of them will be at least a little disorienting because our old patterns, strategies, and habits are not working any more.*
Swaying with the new tempo of the latest transition, requires us to intentionally dance with the awakened emotions — grief, surprise, excitement, overwhelm. Dancing with the emotion is an unnatural response. We might be willing to embrace excitement but most of us want to run from grief, frustration or overwhelm. Often we use the strategy of staying busy to avoid our emotion or think happy thoughts to dismiss our current feelings. The idea of embracing emotion seems foreign.
To embrace it means get familiar with it, learn from it, observe it, attempt to understand it. Try again, when it steps on our toes. Our tendency is to rush through sadness or brush off anger or ignore fear. These emotions are part of us. They deserve some attention. When we invite them to the dance floor, we learn we can handle more than we thought; we recognize we need something we don’t yet have; we discover we deserve to be celebrated; we uncover an adjustment to make. There is so much to learn and unearth that will impact the flow of the next dance.
When we are facing a transition, it is a pivotal moment. When everything feels a little off balance, dance with your emotion.
“When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.” ~Lee Ann Womack
*Download this free ebook that walks you through the phases of transition and gives a few strategies for moving through each phase.
_______________
Michele S. Gooch , Founder
www.lifebydesign.guru
512.922.2335
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
