I wrote this initially for LinkedIn then realised it said more about my approach and values than anything else I’ve written. If what you read here chimes with you, challenges you, or brings illumination as to why you’ve been stuck, then you’re probably in the right place.

(This article was first posted on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/change-your-life-its-just-like-walking-dog-helen–dillon/)

I’m out with my dog in the early morning; it’s cold and I want to march along.

He has other ideas.

He wants to stop and sniff all the things. Sometimes he wants to go back and sniff something he trotted happily past 6 feet ago. And “OMG rabbits!”.

I’m chilly and I try to tug him along, but that’s not going to work for a whole walk. In fact it’ll make both of us crotchety and sad.

So I surrender to his pace, his way of doing this.

Surrender, of course, isn’t what personal development is supposed to be about

Not the conventional kind that’s marketed to keep us in lack, and always striving, anyway.

Personal development/professional growth, career change even, are supposed to be about vision boards, motivation, affirmations, and re-framing your resistance into submission.

Change makes us shiver and we want to march along.

We might even believe that we should be marching along. Caught up in the myth of progress, you might look back and see your route as a linear progression, a straight flight of steps from there to here.

But that’s not how you lived it.

Your growing has its own shape and pace.

And that’s especially true of the kind of inner growth that surfaces in midlife, when old roles no longer fit, and you’re re-evaluating so many things about how you live and work.

Yes, you can plan and set milestones and visualise your goals, and SMART-ify everything in sight, …and these things are all valid and helpful. Up to a point.

But when something in you isn’t having it, doesn’t want to, is determined to chase rabbits, you will either have to attempt to drag it along – making both of you crotchety and sad, and getting ever more stuck as it digs its claws in – or you’ll have to surrender to what it needs.

And by extension to what you need, that you didn’t yet know you needed.

Real change is a journey

It’s a journey that is most often framed as a quest. There and back again having acquired the dragon’s treasure. This is because, while everyone wants things to be different, no one wants to change. Certainly not to be changed.

Yet, honestly, no quest worth embarking on will end with you just as you were when you started.

To an extent you already know this. When you’ve outgrown your life and you feel like burning it all down and starting over, at some level you are aware that what’s required is more than just rearranging the furniture.

The kind of “next chapter” evolution you are embarking on – the kind that reshapes your work and your sense of who you are – is a quest where the journey IS the treasure.

How you go forward as important as whether you go forward.

Some of the desire for plans and milestones and perfectly formed goals can be understood as an attempt to maintain the illusion that you won’t need to change.

The truth is: your plans, milestones, and even your goals, will not make the journey unchanged either.

And this is how it should be. How it always is.

The “soft animal of your body” loves what it loves and needs what it needs. It grows rebelliously and blooms wildly and unexpectedly.

And if you listen to it it will guide you in how to change and how to live.

This is also why you are perfectly equipped to start now. Today.

You not only don’t have to wait to be “finished”, or “ready”, it’s better that you don’t. Finished people have fixed ideas. They prefer to march along a straight path.

Your evolutionary next chapter involves sniffing around roots, nipping down to the river to dip your paws, going back to revisit spots that seem particularly interesting, stopping mid-step to gaze into the distance. Marking your territory so you can find your way back to it.

Something in you knows where and how to start. You just need to allow it to lead you.

Scroll down for practical tips on how to make this work for you.

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Allowing some “wiser part” of you to lead you forward can sound a bit haphazard… like how will you be in charge, how will you be safe? How can you trust that you’ll get where you want to be?

Here are my tips for moving forward when the path isn’t clear:

1. I’m not telling you not to plan. Make your plans, visualise your goals, identify your milestones, then hold them all lightly. Allow planning, visualising, monitoring, and identifying to be supporting processes not leading actors.
2. When things just aren’t changing – you keep repeating the old patterns, be still. (Stop trying to drag yourself forward.) More planning at this stage will just be another expression of the problem. (Many women get stuck right here, sometimes for years.) This is the time to tune in, listen more deeply, let things be as they are, so they can show you how they need to change.
3. Whatever comes in your inner work is the right thing. Because that’s what’s there to be worked with. So if resistance is there, work with that. If shame is there, work with that. Whatever comes is the gateway into what needs to resolve for you to move forward. Every part of you that is part of the problem, holds part of the solution. (Even the most scathing inner critic.) Your task is to gather all that wisdom, hold all of the parts in your larger wiser Self so they can, together, transcend the problem/situation. This is what transformation means.
4. This one is really important. Choose a coach, mentor, or guide who understands you are more than your mindset. Who knows you are not a single minded, single-celled being, but a multiplicity of (often conflicting) identities, processes, parts, and configurations. And one who knows how to help you untangle this.

This is how you not only create the meaningful change you long for, but also develop your change muscles, your living-fully in the face of uncertainty expertise. Growth will always be needed – not just for now, but later too.

You will, I hope, never be finished.

Follow your wild instincts, mark your territory, sniff out deep roots. Adventure calls.