For the longest time, change scared the crap out of me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a work in progress. I still have to actively talk myself down sometimes from freaking out when change is looming or imminent. But over time, I’ve gotten better at accepting change. In fact, I’ve even found embracing change to be quite life altering. Today on the blog, I’m diving into why I believe we could all benefit from getting more comfortable with change.
As I’ve shared previously on the blog, I go to church. I’m a spiritual person, and although I don’t believe I need to go to church to fill my spiritual cup, I really like going. I feel incredibly lucky that in my adulthood, I’ve found a church that accepts me for who I am.
A church that provides me with community.
And a church that fuels my creative side.
A few years ago, our Pastor decided to try something new. She invited us to take a “star word” as we arrived at church. It was the beginning of a new year, and she was passing on a tradition she had learned about at a previous church of hers. She had cut out a bunch of paper stars, and had written a different word on each of them. They were then placed in a basket, and we were invited to take one.
You could look before you took, or you could not look, but our Pastor encouraged us not to look. We were then invited to keep that star word close to us throughout the year. Perhaps we could put it on our mirror, or our refrigerator, and ponder what it might be telling us as the year progressed.
Given that I pick a theme for my year when I do my yearly goal planning, I was all about this activity. It sounded so fun! I couldn’t wait to pick my star word.
I reached my hand into the basket, and without looking, pulled out a star with the word “change” written on it.
I had an immediate negative reaction.
I wanted to throw that star I had just chosen across the room like a hot potato.
Since I was a greeter that day and would be the one handing out the stars to everyone who walked through the door, I quickly put my star word back in the basket, pushing it under a bunch of other ones. I told myself I’d pick one out later, after most everyone else had gotten theirs.
Let me tell you, there were A LOT of stars in that basket. Way more than our small church congregation needed. So a few minutes later, when most folks had already arrived and taken their stars, there were still plenty left.
I was feeling optimistic, so excited to see what my star word would be.
I picked another star out of the basket, without looking.
And there it was again. The star with the word “change” in my hand.
(Note: I did ask the Pastor later if she had made any duplicates of words. Nope, that’s the magic, each star had a different word).
I couldn’t believe it. But also, I should have known. The universe works in mysterious ways.
Why are we all so resistant to change?
Even just hearing the word can spark negative emotions (clearly it did for me that day).
In nature, things change all the time. They say that change is the only constant in nature. Everything must adapt all the time to survive.
So why do we as humans, as just another part of this natural world, fiercely resist change?
I used to get so anxious, so off-kilter, when things would change. Now, I truly believe that getting better at accepting change has made me stronger and more resilient.
I believe that getting comfortable with change can help us in several ways on our financial independence (FI) journeys.
Work
Accepting change has been instrumental in my journey to making my 9-5 job work for me. As much as I want to be work optional, I also crave stability, and I like the security a 9-5 provides for me as I work toward FI.
But making my 9-5 work for me took getting comfortable with the fact that change would happen, all the time, outside my control. And learning to be ok with that. In fact, potentially even thriving during those times.
For the longest time on my work journey, I lived in the world of carefully pre-planned, prescribed change. And that’s the way I liked it.
In high school, I decided I wanted to go to college, and I worked to make that happen. From college, it was on to graduate school. From graduate school, to a postdoctoral fellowship. And then from a fellowship to a professor job. Those who know my story know that the professor job didn’t turn out to be the dream job I thought it’d be…
When I left that not-so-dream job, I was thrown into the uncertainty of freelancing. Sure, I enjoyed the freedom that freelancing provided, the ability to do work when I wanted to do work. At that point, it wasn’t so much the drastic change that threw me off, but the uncertainty of how I would make this work in the long term, where my insurance would come from after my COBRA benefits wore off, and how I would get and maintain clients.
And so, a few months later when one of my freelancing clients offered me a full-time position, even though it was a drastic pay-cut from the professor salary I had been making, I took it without much hesitation. I was just relieved to go back to some stability.
This full-time, pay-cut job was also my first experience in the corporate, non-academic world.
I learned very quickly that things changed ALL the time in this world.
In my 2+ years at that first corporate job, I changed teams at least 4 times, had 5 different managers, worked on countless different products, and edited in several different areas of expertise. We were constantly coming out with new products, different ways of doing things, different types of editing. It was complete night and day compared with my academic experience, where I had one boss and one lab group the entire time I was there. Where we worked on solving little pieces of one big overarching scientific question for years and years and years.
At first, this change was completely jarring. I hated it. I was stressed all the time. Just when I thought I was comfortable, like I could take a deep breath, something would change again and throw me off my game.
But slowly, over time, I realized that all the changes weren’t so bad. The more I talked about how I was feeling with my colleagues, with Mr. Dink, with my accountability partner, the less scary these changes seemed. They started to become normalized.
Upon reflection, I realized I was actually quite good at handling change. Managers loved the way I adapted and shifted priorities on the drop of a hat. They loved my positive attitude.
I realized that when it came to my ability to respond to change, I was getting in my own way. I was getting stressed before it was even necessary. I realized that what bothered me most about change was the anticipation. I would get so worked up worrying about what might change and when, and what bad things might happen because of that change. I was on edge all the time.
But over time, I learned by experience that those worries I had rarely came true. And as those experiences piled up, the more evidence I had that things generally worked out just fine. And the more evidence I had, the less I worried about change. The more I embraced change, the better I was able to let go.
Work and slow FI
Then, as I discovered slow FI and started to learn that there was so much more to life, to me, outside of work, I started to get really comfortable with change.
In fact, I used it to my advantage. I was willing to use change to fuel my lifestyle, to design my own life and work. When I realized I could make work work for me by embracing change, I started designing my life in an intentional way.
It didn’t come super naturally at first, but eventually I got comfortable with change enough to start job hopping, so that I could get things from work that were important to me.
For starters, I risked changing jobs to get a higher salary.
Then, I wasn’t afraid to change jobs to leave a toxic work environment that wasn’t good for me, especially not for my mental health.
I wasn’t afraid to change the narrative at the next job, and was honest about my career goals: that I didn’t want to climb the traditional career ladder.
And I wasn’t afraid to change jobs again when that job didn’t end up being the perfect situation I thought it would be. I really thought my last job would be it, a place I could stay for a long time and eventually downshift to part-time work. When it turned out that wasn’t the case, I could have been crushed. But I wasn’t. I just had to figure out what was next. What next change I had to make, because I was no longer afraid of change.
And guess what? I feel the same way about my current job. Because I’m comfortable with change, I can make one any time I need to.
Change has also helped me in other ways at work. I work in a field dominated by clients, and clients have changing priorities and deadlines. When I first started in this field, I would get really stressed out about changing my priorities. I’d have my schedule all set for the week, and then bam! An urgent project would come up and throw off my entire pre-planned schedule.
Being able to adapt to change at work has been life changing. Once I accepted that constant change was just going to be a part of my day, it made me so much better able to handle the urgent requests that would pop up. Back in the day, these changes would paralyze me. Now, I’m so used to having to shift priorities at the drop of a hat, I actually feel more unsettled when things are calm. And I’ve been able to mentor more junior writers on my team about how to deal with the stress of shifting priorities.
Downshifting
It’s no secret around here that one of my goals is to downshift to part-time work when I hit Flamingo FI, or half my FI number (25x yearly expenses).
The thought of downshifting is scary, and it may be for you too. It can be difficult to imagine not working full-time if that’s all you’re used to. It can feel unsettling to think about making less money. It would be a change, perhaps even a really big change.
But by being comfortable with change, we can do the hard thing. We can make changes in support of our goals and dreams. We can use evidence from the past that change isn’t always bad, and we can handle whatever comes our way.
I think that being comfortable with change will be incredibly helpful when I finally downshift.
This will also be a time when planned change can come in handy. In a perfect world (unless, for example, I get laid off), downshifting will likely be a planned change. One I can prepare for.
However, we can do all the planning we want, and yet any big change will still be just that – a big change. It will still be a mental exercise in getting comfortable with something different, something scary.
So I think one of the keys to downshifting that will help with feeling comfortable about the change is flexibility. Flexibility is another especially powerful skill in the world of financial independence and lifestyle design.
In fact, the author of my favorite book on investing, JL Collins, often talks about the ability to be flexible. He even has a case study on his blog titled The Power of Flexibility. The more comfortable you are with change, the easier it is to be flexible.
Goals
How often do we get so stuck, so down on ourselves about a goal we haven’t met?
Every time we revisit our goals, that same nagging one stands there, begging to be achieved.
For me, it was a weight-loss goal. I had put a specific number down one year when I did my goal setting, and I couldn’t let it go.
It didn’t matter that I had made significant lifestyle changes. It didn’t matter that my diet was better. It didn’t matter that I was feeling better in my body than I’d ever felt. I still hadn’t hit that stupid number, and so I felt bad about myself every time I revisited that goal.
Guess what, my friends? Things change. People change. We change. A goal we set for ourselves one year may not matter to us anymore the next year. Even a goal we set one week might no longer be important to us the next week.
We have to learn to be ok with change. We have to let go of things that aren’t serving us. And goals that don’t matter to us anymore don’t deserve any more of our time and mental energy.
Ultimately, I let go of that weight-loss goal. And do you know what happened? Since letting go, I’ve hit that number (not that it matters). Isn’t it funny how life works sometimes?
Don’t let old goals that don’t matter keep you from shifting, from setting new goals and living your best life. Embrace the change.
Investing
Finally, a note on investing.
Getting comfortable with change is also beneficial for a long-term investing mindset, which all of us in the FI space should have. It’s no secret that the stock market changes all the time. It goes up and down, all the time, every day.
And guess what else? We have no control. As much as we want to, we can’t control what the stock market does on a daily, weekly, yearly basis.
To be successful (both with our money and our minds), we have to remember that we are in it for the long-term. That we can’t change what will happen in the stock market, but we can change how we react. Things are going to change around us all the time, and yet we must stick to our investing strategies. The change happening all around us in the world should not make us doubt ourselves or our investment strategies.
Like I wrote about in this post, getting comfortable with change is just another emotion to embrace, especially when it comes to investing. Markets are up? No need to think too much about it. Markets are down? No need to panic. Change is normal. Change is normal. Change is normal…
In closing
Shortly after giving in to the fact that I was stuck with my “change” star word that day in church, I received a handwritten Christmas letter from my stepmom.
I have a complicated relationship with my stepmom. We met at a time in my life when I was not my best self. To say I wasn’t kind to her is an understatement, and in turn, she wasn’t kind back (I wouldn’t have been either).
We are in a much different, much better, place now. And yet I was still surprised to get her letter. It was so heart-felt. It was hard to believe we had come this far.
But in her letter, there was a line that made me stop in my tracks.
She wrote, “we [her and my dad] have watched you change right in front of our very eyes”.
I froze, letter in hand. In that moment, I realized I had been thinking about my star word (and really the word change in general) all wrong.
The word change didn’t have to always mean that some scary, different thing was about to happen that I had no control over. It didn’t need to always refer to some future change by default.
Change could also be used in the past tense. Because she was right. I have changed, and I can be proud of that. Thinking about all I had accomplished and how far I had come in so many different ways, I realized I could reframe the word change in a more positive light.
Mr. Dink likes to say that we’re all constantly becoming someone or something else. I love when he goes on one of these rants, because he’s so right! Just like everything in nature, we too are constantly changing, evolving, morphing. Even if we don’t think we are, even if we choose not to believe it, even if we resist it with every fiber of our being: we are constantly learning from our experiences and adapting along the way. I don’t think a single one of us could say we’re the exact same person as we were 5 years ago. Or even 1 year ago. And would we even want to be?
Who are you becoming on your slow FI journey? How comfortable are you with change? What changes have you made to design your life in a way that works for you?