CHANGE: Do You Do It? or Does It Undo You?

It has been said that CHANGE is THE only constant. Change is all around us every day and every day our lives our changing. It CAN'T be avoided. We can't bury our heads in the sand or a favored pillow and pretend it isn't there.

? Sometimes it creeps up slowly: over time we've gotten older, gradually the kids grow and leave, incrementally our health fails.

? Other times it is thrust on us: "out of the blue" divorce is upon us, our work demands that we relocate, we are moved from one level of success to another.

? Or sometimes we wake up and realize we have to make a change: we have all of the money and lifestyle trappings we want but something is not right at the core, we are not where we want to be at this stage of life, we can't see what is next.

Change is like the water that our lives are held in and the question becomes do you know how to navigate your boat, yacht or life raft into and through the current of change to the best place possible? When you don't navigate the waterways well you can be lost at sea for much too long, your resources and dreams are depleted, you can be reduced to just existing. Recovering from an experience like this can be costly, eat up valuable time and leave you jaded or disillusioned. Your life energy is sapped. And you are left confused and fearful.

But change can be the great awakener. In retrospect it can be the best thing that ever happened to you. It can contain rewards that you never dreamed of. But in order to access THAT level of change you have to be the captain of the change. You have to muster all of your internal and external resources, all of your navigational skill and make it work FOR you- whatever the change is.

If you don't do something new in the face of change you often merely create the same outworn results. If you don't change your strategy you repeat old patterns of behavior and thinking. You miss the larger possibility and you don't create the life you really want for yourself and your family.

One of my current clients is a woman who came to me during a huge health, financial and relocation crisis. Change was upon her, big time, on almost all levels you can imagine. She had a recurrence of a cancer-based disease; she had to move across country, her finances were scarily low. In our work together she has moved from that place of deep insecurity and confusion to a place where she is settled, more at peace with herself than she has ever been and is now growing a remarkably successful wholesale business. She is fulfilling the dream of the kind of Business and life she has always wanted for herself. She could never have done this without the right kind of support and she is the first one to attest to that.

Another client has suffering from divorce and loss that was blocking her from finishing her dissertation. She was stuck in self-doubt, procrastination, with no vision of the future.She is now close to finishing her dissertation and the last months have been exceedingly rich and empowering for her. Visions of her next steps are forming. She is excited about possibilities where previously she could not sense a direction.

Both decided to take change and make it work for them. They found the support, accessed the resources and built the determination that was needed to navigate into a current that is moving them clearly and safely forward. In looking at their process and that of other clients I have seen a progression of steps that occur when you are moving through change.

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As the change happens you normally:

Choke - this is the time when you feel overwhelmed, confused, fearful and often do nothing. Spending too much time in this phase can seriously undermine your energy, usurp your resources and make it more difficult to deal with the change.Handle the Hurdles - You "wake up" and realize you ha