Choose Change Or It Will Come Looking For You

A few years ago change came looking for me. I didn't go looking for it.

Health issues have a way of doing that. They can stop you mid-stride and force you to pay attention to things you have been conveniently ignoring. And so I woke up and paid attention. I started prioritizing myself not because I had done some deep inner work and arrived at a beautiful realization. But because I didn't have a choice.

And then something unexpected happened.

It worked. I started to feel better. Not just physically. Something else started shifting. And once I felt what it was like to actually put myself first, to tend to myself the way I would tend to someone I loved, I couldn't unfeel it.

It became contagious and I started applying what I was learning to other areas of my life. 

It started with taking an honest look at how I had constructed my life in the first place. This prompted me to ask questions I had never thought to ask before. Not because everything was falling apart. Because I had finally gotten a taste of what it felt like when things were actually working. And I wanted more of that.

That experience changed how I think about change entirely.

Here is something I want to share with you. Your life does not have to be falling apart for you to want something different from it.

Change has a reputation problem. We associate it with crisis. With rock bottom. With the wake up call that finally forces our hand. And those moments are real and they are valuable and sometimes they are exactly what we needed to get us moving.But they are not the only doorway in.

There is another kind of change. A quieter one. A chosen one. The kind that doesn't require your life to implode first. The kind that comes from a different question entirely. Not how do I fix this but how do I expand this.

The difference between those two kinds of change is enormous.

When you make changes from a place of stress, overwhelm and fear, when you are reactive, depleted and operating from crisis mode, the changes you make will likely reflect that state. They are survival moves. They get you out of the burning building. And that matters. Sometimes you need to address the "hair on fire" parts of your life. 

But when you make changes from a place of clarity, rest and confidence, when you are grounded in yourself and oriented toward what you actually want, the changes you make are different in quality, in depth and in staying power. They are not escape moves. They are expansion moves.

One gets you out. The other takes you somewhere.

Most people I work with came to me through a crisis. A betrayal. A loss. A health scare. A moment where life made the decision for them because they hadn't made it for themselves yet. And I have enormous respect for that journey. I have lived it.

But what I have also seen, in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with, is that the most extraordinary growth doesn't happen in the crisis. It happens after it. When someone looks at what the crisis revealed and decides, consciously and deliberately, that they are not going back to the life that preceded it.

That decision. That choice. That is where everything changes.

So, here's the thing. 

You don't have to wait for the crisis to make that choice ( but you could). 

You can look at your life right now, not the parts that are broken but the parts that are fine, and ask: is this the fullest expression of who I am and what I am capable of? Is this the life I would consciously choose if I were choosing from my most expanded, most rooted, most alive self?

If the answer is yes, beautiful. Keep going.

If the answer is anything other than a full-body "yes", that is not a problem. That is a generous and exciting invitation.

Choosing growth and evolution before life forces your hand puts you in a different category entirely. It means you are not waiting for permission or for crisis or for the right moment. You are living as someone who takes their own expansion seriously. Who sees their life as something they are actively building rather than something that is happening to them.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

If you are reading this and something is stirring, if there is a part of you that knows you are capable of more and is tired of waiting for the right moment to pursue it, I want to have a conversation with you.

This is not a sales conversation. It's a real one about where you are, where you want to be, and what might actually be possible if you stopped waiting for something massive to happen that gives you permission to change.

Book a call with me here https://linktr.ee/ilysecraft

There is no perfect moment to begin. There is only the decision to.

Until next time, Ilyse