Not a change, but a transition.

Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

“I’m not sure I want to do that any more”

“I’ve had a weird career trajectory”

“I used to be in marketing, but now I run a non-profit”

“I studied philosophy, but retrained as a designer”

“In college I studied engineering, but a few years ago realised I wanted to be a writer, so now I’m a writer” 

As I reflect on these and other such stories that I hear every day from those close to me, across the work I do in coaching,  marketing, software and design, I've always felt humbled by the breadth of possibility and opportunity that lies before us every day.

Founder, bootstrapper, freelancer, employed/self-employed, side-hustler, pro-bono worker, passive-income hunter…the list goes on, and the changes seem never-ending. Nowadays we can more easily flow from one to the other with more ease than the last generation ever could.

Yet often, if you dig a little into how these changes came about, there was often a sticking point. A moment where people asked “What if I fail?” or “What if don’t like it” or similar. I’ve been there myself, at many points, and I know that feeling of standing at the edge of not knowing. The word that used to haunt me was “change” because it seemed to me that I was leaving everything behind and becoming something different. And that's scary.

It was only when I found a better word, “transition”, that things became a lot easier to imagine. Instead of feeling the loss of the old, I was simply moving from one state to another. Nothing was wasted. I was taking everything with me, and applying it elsewhere in a new way. I was pushing the boundaries of what I thought was comfortable (which I knew was a good thing in any situation) and I was learning, feeding my curiosity. 

To steal an idea from the world of software, if change is a constant, transition is a variable. We get to set it.