Big transitions can be uncomfortable and overwhelming. When the pace of change feels dizzying, sometimes it’s a sign that we need to pause to allow time for new ideas to integrate
Have you had times in your life have you felt as if the ground was shifting underneath your feet and everything was changing?
Where you felt disoriented and dazed because everything that had seemed like such a part of who you are for so long had suddenly come into question?
Where it seemed like you were holding on to the familiar by your fingernails as you wondered what on earth was coming next?
I refer to that as a snowglobe moment.
Snowglobe moments accompany the early inklings of a shift from one state of being to another. They come when something is nudging you to take action towards a vision, ambition or part of yourself that is calling to be expressed. But, for a while, nothing much is clear – everything feels shaken up and all over the place in a fast-whirling blizzard of confusion.
I think one of my clients is deep in one of those snowglobe moments right now.
Over the period that we’ve been working together I can see an acceleration in her transition to a whole new way of living. She’s stepping into a new level of expansion, creativity, self-awareness and self-leadership. The insights are coming through so thick and fast that I can barely keep up with all the things that are shifting between one session and the next.
I know something amazing is going to emerge from the work she’s doing right now, and that she’s excited for the future. It’s certainly exciting to witness. But I also know that she’s finding it pretty exhausting. That there are times when she just wishes it would all stop and that she could settle back into the familiar patterns of the way her life was before.
What I’m witnessing is her cycling rapidly between revelation and integration. Between coming to new conclusions about who she is and who she wants to be, and the process of incorporating these new insights into the self that is yearning to emerge.
She’s in the middle of that blizzard of ideas where things are still obscured and unclear.
I know where she’s coming from too, because I feel as if things have been much the same for me since a few days after I got back from my trip to Porto in late April. A massive download of ideas and insights was just dumped into my head and I know it’s going to take some time to process. I recognise the snowglobe feeling well, and I was half expecting it, but it still feels like a lot.
Snowglobe moments can be prompted by so many things. Being surrounded by people who expose us to new perspectives or ideas, practices like mindfulness, meditation and coaching, even some kind of crisis in our personal or professional lives.
They come at those points when a quiet call to action is gaining volume, and you are on the verge of beginning to listen and respond.
It’s as if, in opening ourselves up to the possibility of stepping into the next level of our lives, the universe responds in turn. For my client, and for me, that response seems to have been rather enthusiastic, as if the universe was already poised and waiting with the message:
Fantastic, you’re ready. So glad you called. We have some stuff in mind for you.
Here it is.
All of it.
At once.
Seriously? Couldn’t you have drip-fed it or something?
When I was thinking about how these snowglobe moments can feel, I was reminded of the scene in the 1960 film version of HG Wells’ Time Machine where the Time Traveller decides to head into the future. At first the journey is fascinating and exciting, but at some point the pace of change is so rapid that it becomes totally overwhelming.
Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be a coin spinning on a tabletop, and the way the movement seems to get so much faster and more frantic in the seconds before the penny drops…
Change is uncomfortable. It’s why we so often resist it. We are comfort-seeking animals driven by millennia of evolution to gravitate towards the safety of the familiar. Our minds struggle to accommodate all the unknown variables of newness. Our nervous systems react as if we are under threat and try to draw us back into our well-established selves like pulling your hand back from a hot flame.
What we need to recognise in these moments of dizzying change and discomfort is that there will always be what one of my coaches rather wonderfully termed the gap between realisation and manifestation. That, as we transition from one way of being to another, we need to allow ourselves the grace and the space to integrate these new ways of being into our lives.
That perhaps the best way to deal with a snowglobe moment is to wrap yourself up in a metaphorical blanket of self-compassion, keep a steady forwards momentum, and just wait to see how the landscape has changed when the blizzard settles.
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This is one of a series of (regular-ish) articles and blog posts about coaching, compassion and culture. Head to annettecorbett.com/links to read more about my work and sign up to my mailing list
Helping women in the creative industries reveal their inner awesome, so they can practice more compassion in their life, leadership and wellbeing without cracking up, giving up, or compromising their core beliefs