Getting Unstuck: How to Change When Change Is Hard

Major life decisions can be hard.

Should you quit your job? Break up with your partner? Start a new business? Move to the suburbs?

These single decisions can alter the course of your life. How do you even begin to decide?

Try starting with one simple question:

“Do I still want to be here (in this job or this relationship or this location) five years from now?”

If the answer is yes, then stay put. 

If the answer is no, then ask yourself another question: “Why haven’t I done it yet? Why haven’t I made the change I know I want to make?”

There might be a legitimate reason why you haven’t made the change. But, more likely, you’re putting it off.

If we give ourselves the choice between changing now or changing later, we will almost always choose later.

Why? Because change is hard. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary. So, we put it off. And we put it off. And we put it off some more. And then five years go by and we’re still stuck in the same place.

This is not entirely our fault. We are wired to resist change and uncertainty. So much so that uncertain outcomes actually stress us out more than predictable negative outcomes do. So, we stay in jobs we hate and in relationships that aren’t working and cities we don’t like. The outcomes might be negative, but at least they’re predictable.

This all sounds a little depressing. If we want to change our lives, we have to face uncertainty, the very thing we are wired to resist.

But what if we can actually use this information about ourselves to make better decisions and overcome our resistance to change?

Make change your default

If we know that we are wired to resist change, then our greater danger might not be that we will make choices that we shouldn’t but that we won’t make the choices we should.

And if we know where we are likely to go wrong, then we can change our default to make it harder to go in that direction.

Instead of asking ourselves whether we should make a change now or later, our default can be that we will make it now unless we have good reason not to.   

So, instead of asking yourself “Should I make this change?” [quit my job, break up with my partner, start a family, etc.]” ask yourself “Why not make this change now?”

Will this be any easier later?

Shifting our default to change can give us a little extra help in overcoming our natural resistance towards change. It still allows us to decide against change, but it raises the bar. Now we need to come up with good reasons not to make the change now.

Of course there are a lot of legitimate reasons for staying where you’re at a bit longer even if you know you want to change eventually. You might not want to be at your current job five years from now, but you might want to stay another year or two to learn something new, hone a new skill, or gain important experience for the job you want next. You might eventually want to move to the suburbs once you have kids, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the city in the meantime.

But there is a difference between choosing to wait and getting stuck. The trick is to distinguish reasons from rationalizations—the things that keep us stuck in places we don’t want to be.

And this requires some uncomfortable honesty about why we haven’t made a change yet.

The biggest reason we don’t actually make the changes we want in our life is that change is hard and scary. But you can challenge that resistance. Ask yourself, “Will this change be any easier later?”

Sometimes the answer is yes. And then we might have good reason to wait.

But, if you know you want to change and it won’t get any easier later, then do it now.

As Mark Twain famously observed, when we have to do something unpleasant, it’s good to get it over with: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning.”

If you still don’t want to eat your frog, remind yourself of the benefit of doing the hard thing now: you won’t have to do it later. As Twain put it, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Not only will it get the frog off your plate, it will also give you more time to do the things you want. You won’t spend the next five years stuck in place worrying about how unpleasant it will be to eat the frog. You’ll be able to spend the next five years growing and moving forward with your life. 

Change is almost never easy. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Sometimes we just need to ask ourselves, “Why not now?”

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This is Post #4 in our Getting Unstuck Series. Check out the rest of the series here:

• Getting Unstuck: How to Prioritize Your Life
• Getting Unstuck: How to Follow Through on Your Priorities
• Getting Unstuck: How to Achieve Work-Life Balance
• Getting Unstuck: How to Change Your Life in 5 Seconds

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Also published on Medium.