#41 -Frightened of Change?

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Hey There my name is Santi, welcome to the podcast. Today I want to do a short episode, just myself to talk about change.

I want to share my thoughts with you about questions such as:

How can we deal with change?

What should we do when we are frighted by change?

What do the Stoic philosophers think about change?

I want to talk about this, because in 4 days I will be flying back to Ecuador, I've been living with my girlfriend here in England for 1 year and a half and we'll be going through a lot of change.

Right now I'm staying at my uncle's house close to London and I don't have my proper microphone, but I thought it would still be valuable to share some thoughts on change, for those of you who are facing change in you lives as well.

 

"Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? Can’t you see? It’s just the same with you – and just as vital to nature."

-Marcus Aurelius

Change is an essential part of being human.

Change is a vital process. The way I see it there are two types of change.

• The changes we decide to make. Through concepts like self-improvement, philosophy habit formation and so on.
• The other type of change is external and outside of our control. Things that happen to us.

For instance in my life I have to go back to Ecuador because my Visa here in the UK is about to expire. These are circumstances I must learn to adapt to and accept.

Weather it's self-imposed or external we must admit we don't like change, we fear it and there's nothing more threatening to our psychology than uncertainty.

I think it all comes don't to the wish to be in control all the time.

We must constantly keep dividing our life circumstances into the aspects we have control over and those we don't.

There are so many external thing we will not control during periods of change, but we can start my controlling our emotions and response towards these circumstances.

things get complicated when we are so anxious that we cant control our response about things. Then we an easily fall into a loop of feeling guilty for not being able to calm down and we end up even more anxious.

For these kind of situations I want to share a great practice that has truly helped me on all aspects of my life, specially when it comes to emotions I don't feel I can control.

What we must do is realize our constant need to fix things, to fix ourselves, or emotions, our way of thinking.

Yet the way we think and feel is the product of years of habits and emotional patterns, some ways of thinking cannot be changed from night to day.

We must be patience.

For this we can use the idea of:

Understand don't fix.

This means taking a step back and observing your emotions, not judging them, but only aiming to understand them.

For instance, I am afraid of all the uncertainty that will come in the coming months moving back to my country.

There are a lot of worries.

• Financial
• Emotional
• Professional

and so on.

There are some worries that make me over think a lot, some are problems I don't even have yet, that I already worry about finding how to solve.

Here I can engage on the mindset of understand don't fix.

Taking a step back to understand, either through writing our thoughts, meditation or any other way you find useful in the moment.

Our instant reaction is to fix ourselves in the moment.

We see a big change in our lives coming and we want to fix ourselves fully so that we can start fresh.