Before You Change Anything
On staying, leaving, and telling the truth about why.
Hello friend,
As the year comes to a close, I’ve found myself looking back at the choices I’ve made. Maybe you did too.
As a transition coach, change is my expertise. I support people through career shifts, identity questions, endings, and beginnings. Embracing change can be very powerful.
And yet, lately, I’ve been sitting with a quieter, harder question:
What if the real work isn’t about changing, but about understanding why we want to?
A Story: When the Pattern Follows Us
“I’m done,” my client said. “I don’t understand why this keeps happening. I change jobs, but it's always the same story. I feel overworked, unseen, and not respected. No one listens to my ideas.”
Their frustration landed in my body. I’ve heard this many times.
And, in different forms, I’ve told it myself too.
We live in a world where movement is easier than ever before. We can change jobs, cities, and partners multiple times in a life. And at times, that freedom is life-saving. It opens doors and makes real growth possible.
But there’s another side to it.
When something starts to feel uncomfortable, our first instinct is often to leave. To start fresh. To change the outside, without pausing to ask what wants to be felt, named, or faced on the inside.
In today’s culture, stillness has become suspicious.
Staying can look like stagnation or a lack of ambition, like failure.
And yet, constant movement can leave us strangely empty. Always in motion, always adjusting, but never fully grounded anywhere, or with ourselves.
A tree that is rerooted again and again struggles to bear fruit. Not because the soil is wrong every time, but because roots need time to grow deep.
A Thought: The Question Isn’t Stay or Go
To be clear, this is not an invitation to stay in places that are harmful, unsafe, or soul-crushing. Staying is not automatically wise. And leaving is not automatically avoidance.
There is a real difference between staying in a situation that stretches you and staying in one that slowly erodes you while you call it growth.
What matters is whether we dare to pause and understand our why.
When it’s safe enough, stillness can become a mirror. When we stop moving for a moment, we begin to hear what’s actually happening beneath the urge to escape or fix. We can ask better questions. We can feel what we’ve been avoiding.
“What we don’t attend to will continue to organise our life.”
Tara Brach
Sometimes leaving is the work, especially when staying means abandoning yourself.
And sometimes staying becomes the work. Because whatever feeling we’re trying to avoid, fear, rejection, loneliness, inadequacy, has a way of recreating itself, no matter where we go.
A Practice: The Honest Questions
If you’re standing at the edge of a decision, try sitting with these questions, try not to answer them quickly, but let them work on you:
Am I running away, or running toward something?
What feeling is present here that I don’t want to feel?
If I stayed, what would I need to face - in myself or in this situation?
Am I ready for that?
If I left, what might I be relieved of? And what might follow me anyway?
Sometimes the deepest shift happens not when we move, but when we stay still and listen.
Wish your decisions next year are grounded in your why.
With warmth,
5. Who can support me in feeling what I struggle to feel? What would it take to commit to receive that support?
Love it! Powerful questions to reflect on. Love the emphasis on the why vs the willingness to change without evaluating if staying can bring more value and inner change.