How To Open Yourself Up To Change

If you had asked me months ago to give you advice on how to open yourself up to change, I probably would’ve looked you in your eyes and said, “just change”. At the time, I was so impulsive and free-flowing that I would make rapid decisions to inflict change as soon as I got uncomfortable. You see, I was more uncomfortable with working through things than changing them completely. Just so you know in case that lifestyle sounds fun to you, it’s not. Running to change can prove to be as detrimental to your sanity as running from change can be. What I have learned since then, is that the best way to begin opening yourself up to change is by dealing with and healing the past. After all, if you changing your surroundings will still allow for the same habits if you don’t address them. Although I am no master at change, I have learned and grown enough to compile some of my best advice for you on how to open yourself up to change and become the butterfly you’re meant to be.

Heal Yourself

The first step to opening yourself up to or coming to terms with change is to heal yourself from your recent trauma or heartbreak. This isn’t to say you should stay stagnant in your life until you feel like the best version of yourself again. You obviously will have to enter a period of change while you’re still healing but, if you don’t make time to heal your old wounds before entering new paths, you will be more likely to carry that pain, trauma, or mistakes into your new reality which opens you up to reliving the same scenarios. Take time to look back on previous events and ask why you did what you did or why someone else’s actions made you feel the way they did. Sometimes, our trauma is not as easy to unpack on our own. So, if you feel comfortable and are able, I suggest using the need for change as an opportunity to begin or go back to therapy and really dive into this new chapter, too.

Learn From Mistakes

Any new chapter in your life gives you the perfect opportunity to learn from past mistakes and come back better from them. This is the next step to opening yourself up to change because after you’ve come to terms with the past and how your actions impacted it, you can then look at what you learned and how it can make you better. The reason each chapter of our lives is so wildly different is that each time you have new mistakes to have learned from and set yourself up for success in a new way. Each phase of our life is supposed to be a learning experience for us so please, don’t be hard on yourself for needing to learn from previous mistakes when you feel you shouldn’t be making mistakes anymore. We all need to make mistakes to grow from them. The more actively you look at your mistakes and learn and focus on not making them again, the less likely you’ll be to find yourself in the same place you were months before. We only ever stay stagnant when we don’t let ourselves get better.

Release Expectations

When you let go of expectations you have for yourself, you let yourself go from an attachment to an outcome that will impact your actions and reactions during this change. More often than not, the most amazing things come into your life when you’re not expecting them to. So, open yourself to the concept that what is meant to happen, will happen. At the end of the day, whenever we get attached to the outcome of situations we are faced with some sort of pain because even when things work out just as you’d like them to, they aren’t always picture perfect. Plus, when entering a world of change, getting upset at the start when you see it’s not all you imagined will only make your experience harder. You could be in this phase of your life for years, who is to say that the best parts won’t be the last two years of this part of your life? Maybe you have to hold off your excitement and live through the painful lessons first. My point is, life is a rollercoaster and your perspective is responsible for how bumpy you allow the ride to feel. You know when you’re five and on a kiddo rollercoaster and it feels GIANT and SO SCARY? But then, you turn 16 and even the massive rollercoasters aren’t scary anymore? Well, not only did you get bigger in size comparison, but you got braver and your perspective on the size and danger levels changed. Life is the same thing, just one big wild rollercoaster ride.