Adjusting to Change: Why Good Change Can Feel Hard
Adjusting to change can feel surprisingly uncomfortable when it’s a change you wanted. You’ve put thought into the decision, and there are reasons you’re glad you made it. Then you find yourself struggling with parts of the experience you were excited to begin.
In this week’s newsletter, I shared how this is showing up as I begin practicum and take on new commitments. What interests me is how quickly the discomfort of being new can turn into a question about whether we’re capable.
There’s a lot happening between “this feels unfamiliar” and “I don’t know if I can do this.” Understanding what happens there gives us more room to learn without making every difficult moment a verdict on our future.
We Have Expectations About How Good Change Should Feel
When we imagine a positive life change, we usually imagine some of the feelings we hope will come with it. A new job brings the possibility of meaningful work. Moving somewhere we love offers a different daily life. We’re looking forward to the experience as much as the change itself.
Once it happens, there are details to navigate that weren’t especially vivid in our daydreams. We have to ask questions, rearrange routines, and make decisions with limited experience. Even something we chose carefully can ask more of us than we expected.
The NHS guidance on life changes acknowledges that positive and expected changes can cause stress. Wanting something and finding the adjustment difficult can happen together.
Yet there’s often an expectation running underneath the experience: if this is good for me, I should feel good about it.
That expectation makes a rough day confusing. Now we’re dealing with the difficulty itself and wondering why we’re having it. The happiness we anticipated becomes a standard we keep measuring ourselves against.
Feeling Uncertain Becomes a Story About Our Ability
“I don’t know how to do this yet” leaves room for learning. “I’m bad at this” reaches a conclusion.
The shift between those thoughts can happen quickly, especially when doing well matters to us. Imagine beginning a role where you need help with tasks your colleagues handle easily. You ask a question, receive an answer, and then feel embarrassed that you needed to ask.
The question has been answered, but the embarrassment stays with you.
By the end of the day, that moment might become the thing you remember most clearly. The work you completed receives less attention because you’re still wondering what someone thought of you.
This is where getting specific matters. Were the instructions unclear? Was there a skill you hadn’t learned? Those details tell us something useful about the situation. A broad judgment about our ability makes it harder to see what would help.
I’m interested in how much energy goes into evaluating ourselves while we’re trying to learn. When every question feels like a test of whether we belong, being a beginner gets exhausting.
Familiarity Has Been Doing Some of the Work
There’s another reason life transitions can shake our confidence: we leave behind routines that have been helping us function.
In familiar work, we know whom to ask and roughly how long things take. We’ve learned which problems need immediate attention and which ones can wait. Much of that knowledge has become so ordinary that we stop noticing it.
Starting something new makes us aware of all those small decisions again. A task that sounds simple can take time because we’re also learning the process around it.
It’s easy to compare how we function in this new setting with how we function somewhere we’ve spent years. That comparison leaves out the experience that made the familiar setting easier.
Being capable includes knowing how to use resources and ask for guidance. It also includes recognizing when a task requires training we haven’t received yet. We can take our responsibilities seriously while being honest about where we are in the learning process.
Some Parts of the Situation Need to Change Too
Giving ourselves time to adjust still leaves room to question the conditions we’re adjusting to.
A role with unclear expectations creates difficulties that deserve a conversation. A schedule that leaves no time to recover needs attention, even when we care about every commitment on it. Calling everything “part of the process” can leave practical problems untouched.
So when something feels hard, it helps to stay with the details long enough to understand what’s happening.
For a new responsibility, that could mean asking someone to walk through the task with us. With competing commitments, it could mean changing what we’ve agreed to do. The answer becomes clearer when we identify the difficulty we’re facing.
There’s room to revise an arrangement we chose. Learning what works includes discovering what needs to be different.
Magnolia and the Need to Know It Will Work Out
Even when we’ve made practical adjustments, there’s a question we may still want answered: is all this effort going somewhere?
Magnolia belongs here through its teaching about trusting the movement of our lives when we can’t yet see the outcome. In my apothecary, it’s an essence for those moments when we feel discouraged by time or unsure what to do after trying everything we can think of.
Its teaching offers a way to explore the pressure we put on progress. We want evidence that our effort matters, and we want it soon enough to reassure us before the next uncertain step.
Working with a flower teaching gives us a question to return to as we notice our responses. With Magnolia, I’m interested in this one: how much reassurance am I asking each experience to give me about my whole future?
That’s a lot to ask of one day.
You can explore this teaching through Unfolding with Magnolia.
If flower essences are new to you, Flower Essences 101 introduces how I work with them.
As you move through a change of your own, consider what you’re using to decide whether it’s going well. Is there something you understand now that you didn’t understand when you began? Let that count, even while other questions remain open.
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