December Issue of Community Now! Magazine

Pause and Pivot

I grew up in a household where it appeared that we were constantly on the move. By the time I was sixteen we had moved thirteen different times and I had attended ten different schools. While my parents didn’t have a huge amount of money we were always visiting relatives on the weekends with long weekends being a seven hour long drive to my grandparents place. Sometimes it felt like we grew up in the backseat of the car.

My travels and moving didn’t end once I graduated from high school. I continued to move around while in college and university, different apartments and different roommates. In my working career, I followed a similar path of transition from one job to another, from one field to another. Over the course of my life I have worked in tourism, retail, construction, health and safety, real estate, software support, administration, oil and gas, and engineering. I also managed to get bit by the global travel bug along the way and have visited twenty-six different countries.

Through all of these moves and changes in my life I have managed to gain an incredible set of skills that allowed me to adapt and transition with a huge amount of ease. Every new home, school, job, chapter in my life was something to look forward to and embrace. I didn’t get stuck in the muck of worry, anxiety, what if’s, or drawn to my holding on to my past. I learned to adjust my mental mind-set, find out what needed to be done, whom I needed to talk to, whom I needed to connect with, and adapt. I had become a master of transition.

At the end of 2015, I went through another major change in my life. I chose to leave the corporate world just as menopause was starting to take hold. At the time I had been working on a very stressful major project that was winding down for our team. Given the stress of the project I really needed a break and so that’s what I chose to do, take a break, full stop.

At first I just took time off to enjoy some down time at home, a chance to really enjoy the Christmas season. After a few weeks I started on a path of self-healing. That meant taking care of my physical health, my mental health and my spiritual health. Being at home by myself gave me the time and space in which to focus inward and on what was important to me. In some ways it was the pause and reflection that I needed.

In the months that followed I started to gain more energy and self-awareness and it was time to explore what I wanted to do next. I knew I wasn’t ready for full on retirement. I still had a lot more to contribute to my community, but what did that look like?

I decided to go and buy some big self-adhesive poster paper and start mapping out some of the things that were going on in my head. My first poster had words, pictures and drawings of things that I was truly passionate about. I grouped some of these things together so it was easier to visualize them. The second poster listed off all of the things I knew how to do; every skill or cluster of knowledge that I possessed. I listed everything from cooking and cleaning, to advanced Excel spreadsheets, health and safety, human resources and project management. Like my first poster, I also grouped these items as much as possible acknowledging that there were lots of crossovers. On a third poster I listed off people I knew, and I grouped them by the communities I knew them from and their relevance in my life. Family and close friends were close to me and in the centre with all my other communities and network groups surrounding me, supporting me.

Then I walked away from the boards and let them hang in my spare room. I casually went and cleaned my house and as I did I found myself mentally making room and space in my mind, making room for whatever was next. Occasionally, I would go and have a look at those posters and try and make sense of what it was all supposed to mean and what I was supposed to do with it.

One day, while looking at the boards, I realized that on my skills and knowledge list I knew how to do a lot of things that I didn’t actually like doing; things that I had learned or done out of necessity of the time, but ones that didn’t ignite my soul. That’s when I started crossing off items. Anything that I truly hated doing I put a line through. I took a closer look at the things that I did like doing and how they correlated to the things I was passionate about.

Next I started to ask myself why. Why did I like doing some of the things that were on the board? Why was I passionate about youth, feminism, and empowerment? Why were these things important to me? Then came the questions of how important were these things to me? What was I willing or not willing to do about this? What was my commitment level? I had so many questions, but they were also invaluable in defining my next steps.

It was through this process that I became consciously aware that I love working with teens and young adults.

I love coaching and mentoring and helping others to discover their own inner wisdom, their own path to selffulfillment. It was through this process I realized that I was also willing to put in the time and effort that it takes to becoming better at what I do, gain new knowledge and skills, accessing different demographic clusters, finding new ways to empower and lift up our youth. This led me to pursuing a formal coaching certification to support my new trajectory.

From this experience I was able to capture some of the processes that I have utilized to manage transition. This transition was the thing I needed to better understand what I had done in the past, what works, what doesn’t and why. It gave me insight into tools I didn’t even know I had been using. In my opinion there are four main principles to start with.

The first concept is to Pause. So often when something happens that requires change or transition we just switch gears and push through. However, when we take time to Pause and reflect we are able to create our own mental notes of lessons learned and best practices. The time we take allows us to better understand ourselves, and the world around us. It also allows us time to heal from any previous negative experiences that we had so that we are not allowing that experience to cloud our future or hinder our progress. The Pause also gives us time to heal from past wounds and to make sure those wounds aren’t susceptible to future infection or rupture.

The second concept is to listen to our heart. This is not always easy when we live in a world that is full of opinions. Our friends and family are all to eager to provide their feedback and input. However good their intentions are, they often can’t know what our heart desires because we have built up our own impenetrable wall or their coloured glasses are casting shadows that don’t exist. Only when we listen to our heart are we acknowledging the divine universal gift that we are destined to use in this crazy world we live in. To not listen to our heart and use the gifts we were given is akin to withholding our love to those that are dearest to us. We are meant to share all that we are at our core with those around us in our local and extended communities.

Third, there is nothing wrong with a Pivot. Pivoting is part of our journey. There is no straight line. To be clear, pivoting is not retracing our steps, going backwards or switching tracks. Pivoting is when we take all of the knowledge and skills that we have gained along the way and apply them in a slightly different way or direction. We can never retrace our steps because we have already garnered skills and experiences from our previous experiences. Going backwards implies that we are losing our memories and experiences. Switching tracks requires us to compartmentalize our knowledge and skills and leave them on the old track and bring nothing forward with us. Pivoting is an adjustment in the journey whereby we bring forward the knowledge and skills that we have gained and learn to apply them in a different environment or time in space. Pivoting is seizing the lessons of the past and knowing that they served a purpose. Embrace the Pivot, it is part of the journey.

Finally, don’t be so hard on yourself. Remember there is a precious soul within us. Treat it like a child with gentle loving care. If life were without challenges there would be no celebrations for the efforts and hard work that goes into overcoming the hurdles and barriers. Imagine your inner child learning to ride a bike. At first there is no balance and certainly some missteps and falls, but eventually, we find our balance and we are able to take off down the block with our newfound freedom and rejoice in the fact we can ride a bike. Know that with encouragement and kind words we too can achieve what once seemed impossible.

Change is inevitable, and the only thing we can do about it to choose how we are going to respond to it. Choosing to embrace the Pause and Pivot process sets us up to be better equipped to take those next steps in our journey.

NineAndThreeQuartersCoaching.com