It’s April and we all long for a fresh start, an end to winter and the start of a season where it feels good to get outside our walls. And we all, no matter how many springs we have actually experienced, imagine spring as a sudden burst of sunshine and warmth and tulips.
That’s not how it happens. We will get our fresh start but it will feel less like stepping out of warm shower and more like picking our way through the mud. We can’t avoid the weather, but we can avoid the muckiness of other kinds of fresh starts. We know from experience that a fresh start moves forward in fits and starts, with lots that is unfamiliar and some that is unwelcome. Starting is hard.
Sustained positive change requires that we get started. And it’s easy to start for the length of a TikTok video. It’s much harder to maintain the start through the weeks when you have to adapt to a new environment or build a new habit. It will probably seem that everything–and everyone–is out to derail you.
In a way, that will be true. Your own senses will scan the environment for what is familiar and prompt you to go back to old signals and responses. The people in your life will act as if nothing has changed, and feed you suggestions that won’t fit with your new start. Your auto-pilot will feel glitchy until it resets.
This is why it helps to have a guide through change and a group that alternately nudges and cheers as you make your uneven way forward into a new position or skill set or relationship. We love NLP certification training because it takes long enough to support people through a fresh start. . . and it makes it much easier to enjoy the bumps and curves along the way.
Muck and bumps and curves are not bad in themselves: they are exactly how we make great play spaces for kids. We can learn to welcome them if we are with people who can see them for what they are: the building blocks of a fresh start.
