You know what it’s like when you discover someone you think is cute drives a Jeep and suddenly everywhere you look you see Jeeps? I’m feeling a bit of that at the moment when it comes to life changes like the one I’m going through with my semi-retirement. By the way, this seeing the same thing everywhere is called the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” or the “frequency illusion,” and I’m seeing conversations about life changes everywhere I look. For example, the Apple News Conversations podcast began a series on Transitions starting with a conversation with Hidden Brain’s  Shankar Vedantam on how the brain is hardwired to resist change. 

Three Hobbies
Three Hobbies

Hidden Brain’s Vedantam presented three Transition Questions that one must ask oneself:

  1. Am I doing something that I love or is something that I think that I’d love to do?
  2. Am I going to be good at what I do or want to do?
  3. Does the world need what it is that I’m going to be doing?

These are difficult questions to be honest about. Many of us, especially if you were raised in a working class family like I was, have a difficult time with the notion that one even has a choice when it comes to work. When I was teaching at Full Sail University we were discussing Ben Zander’s Art of Possibility and one student, who was the breadwinner of her family, couldn’t imagine risking her teaching job by asking for more than what she was being given. There’s a definite dissonance growing up in an era when we were told, as a group, that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to, but I felt from my family that I needed to get whatever job I could and that I should be thankful that anyone would give me said job. So, right now thinking that I need to be choosy and not just look for something “not-teaching” is causing me some anxiety.  Especially when I look at that last question, Does the world need what it is that I’m going to be doing?Seriously? Right now shareholders of news organizations are contemplating how quickly ChatGPT will be ready to do all the journalism jobs. Ugh. 

Vedantam then offered up what he called the three engines that can overcome our brain’s resistance to change and change our lives:

  • Curiosity: It’s the engine that we’re all equipped with as children that we need to keep fueled as we get older and are getting pounded to sit down and shut up. 
  • Humility: It’s easy for most of us to recognize that we aren’t the same person that we were 5- or 10-years ago. What we want from life, our understanding of things or everything, who we think we are, all these things might have changed. At the same time, we tend to assume that how we think right now won’t change going forward, even though everything may have changed looking at our former selves. We need to exercise humility because our future selves might have a problem dealing with the terms and agreements that we use to live by in the before time. As we go forward, we don’t know what we don’t know and we need to stay humble about the challenges we are likely to face.
  • Bravery: We don’t know what’s on the other side of the leap that we feel like we need to make. You don’t do this if you want to play it safe. The hungry souls who may have been following the herds across the Bering Strait, those who got in a boat and left Europe, those who decided that they we were tired of winters in New England, those who wanted more for their children than warlords or gangs. I wouldn’t even be here if my grandfather didn’t decide to leave his village and make his way to San Gabriel, CA in the 1910s. None of them really knew what was on the other side, but they recognized that a choice needed to be made and they made it. I’ve quoted this line before, but in the last episode of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, during Midge’s break-through stand-up routine, she talks about why being successful is so important to her:

“ I want a big life, I want to experience everything, I want to break every single rule there is. They say that Ambition is an unattractive trait in a woman. Maybe. But you know what’s really unattractive? Waiting around for something to happen. Staring out a window, thinking the life you should be living is out there somewhere, but not being willing to open the door and go get it, even if someone tells you you can’t. Being a coward is only cute in the  Wizard of Oz.”

Midge Maisel
Mrs. Maisel Last Standup-Wizard of Oz

So, my brain is now trained to see every reference to life transitions or the difficulty of change in life. Now I need to gather up my mental and emotional energies to make the changes that I want to see in my life, because no one is going to give it to me and it sure as hell isn’t going to happen by accident. One step at a time, using everything that I’ve learned to this point and plotting a course forward into that unknown country, just like my grandfather did over 100-years ago.   

1900s young Reyes family
1900s young Reyes family

Resources: