Techniques to help you figure out how to make a big life change
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I had this idea when I was a kid, this fantasy, really, that one day everyone I knew, my family, my friends, we would all live together in one giant mansion and we'd just hang out and play every day forever. We'd be happy and nothing would ever have to change. Sweet. I know.

but misguided for so many reasons. One of them is that change is constant, right? Nothing stays the same throughout our lives. We get together and we break up. We get a job, then we leave it. We move to a new city, then move again, make friends, lose friends, make more friends. We grow up. Our kids grow up. That idea scared the crap out of me for a long time. But lately, it feels like a blessing.

That change is always possible and is inevitable, really. Because that means we have so many opportunities to try new things and to start over. Art Markman is a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and he's the author of the book Smart Change. And he says we can create these moments of change whenever we want.

And something I've been trying for years is to create a new holiday, which is the day that you truly commit to how you're going to be different in the next year, where you've done the planning and you've made the changes to your environment. And I've decided it should be March 4th because we're going to march forth into the new year. I've been I've been flogging that thing for years. It hasn't caught on yet, but you never know.

So have you been thinking about a big change? Going back to school, starting your own business, moving cities or countries, having a baby, devoting yourself to a new skill or hobby? On this episode of Life Kit, how to get started. If you want to make a shift in your life or try something you've been scared to do for a long time, this episode is for you. Journalist Ajua Jimmabrampong, who's no stranger to big changes herself, has some tips for you.

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This message comes from Warby Parker. What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras, without the extra cost. Like free adjustments for life. Find your pair at warbyparker.com or visit one of their hundreds of stores around the country. By the time this episode airs, I'll be living in a new city. It'll be my 12th big move as an adult. Just about all of the others have been either cross-country or international.

By comparison, this is a tiny hop three hours away. But I'm still going to have to reinvent everything about my daily life, from my grocery runs to my language classes. I don't sit still very well, and I love a challenge. When it comes to moves, I'm a bit like Mary Poppins. I stay until the wind changes. But that hasn't always been the smartest impulse, and there's a lot about starting over that I've learned the hard way.

So for this episode, I talked to three people with front row seats to big change, other people's, and also their own. In 2011, Victor Saad was working with middle and high school students in the Chicago area. He was grappling with the mid-recession compulsion to go back to grad school, but wasn't convinced he wanted to go into that much debt for an MBA. And what I started to do is just unpack the things that an MBA gives you.

So think about, okay, a network, you know, practical tools, some credibility and employment opportunities. Okay, when you start pulling apart what an MBA gives you, then you can almost start thinking about other paths to get there. And I just started thinking about this idea of like designing my own. He talked it over with people in his life, trying to find a good container for everything he wanted to do.

And then one friend pointed at the calendar, and a name bubbled up. Leap Year Project. 12 projects, 12 months, all in 2012. And so I had written a resignation letter to my job at the time that said, you know, Leap Year Project is on. Victor traveled around the world, shadowing people whose projects inspired him, from a creative studio in San Diego to a socially conscious menswear company in China.

And at the end of the year, he started his own project. Experience Institute is an organization that walks people through big leaps, professional or otherwise. And takeaway number one is to do just what Victor did. Take some time to reflect on what you're really hoping to accomplish and why. Once you've figured out what you're excited about, you can find some creative paths to get there.

Victor has a written exercise he suggests. Start by drawing two vertical lines on a piece of paper. And on the left side of the left line is where you are. And on the right side of the right line is some idea of where you want to be. And what happens is you start thinking about where you are and what is good, what is challenging to you, what is not going well, and what's the image of where you want to be. And then you start designing for the middle. ♪

So maybe on the left side, you're still living in the town you grew up in. And on the right side is a fabulous life in the city where you've always dreamed of living. Hanging out with artists, working a job that inspires you, and playing roller derby on the weekends. But you've always been too intimidated by the idea of packing up and leaving everything you've ever known. Think about all the things that could happen in the middle. All these little experiments that you could run.

These smaller steps, you know, and for now, don't even worry about whether or not they're feasible. I want you to think big and broad and grand, and then we can make them smaller. And one or two of those, one or two of those ideas is going to resonate with you.

Your first step might be to book a long weekend to Dream City and visit like you live there. No tourist spots, just walking through neighborhoods exploring. And finding potential grocery stores. But maybe you also look around for arts collectives near you and start taking roller skating lessons. Another way you can reflect is to try reimagining the way you see yourself.

Art Markman, the cognitive scientist we heard from at the start of the episode, has some tips on how to tackle this. There's a psychological test called the 20 statements test where you give 20 different answers to the question, who am I?

which gives you an opportunity to see how is it that you describe yourself. So that could be, I'm smart, I'm athletic, I'm a parent or a friend. What that tells us is we can decide for ourselves which of the things that we do or that we engage in that are really intrinsic to who we think we are and which of those things are not. So to get past your intimidation about uprooting your life,

Maybe one of your statements is some version of "I'm adventurous" or "I love trying new things." Or if you're nervous about being bad at a new language, you could try "I'm curious" or "I'm a learner." Let's say you need one last check to figure out if a big change is the right choice. You might do what I did and phone a friend. Luke Danny Blue has counseled me through some pretty big changes over the past decade.

Their first suggestion is always get out of your head and into your body. The technique is basically to take whatever the options are one at a time and hold it in your mind, whether it's an image or a sense memory. You just sort of hold it in your mind and you feel into what your body, like what your reaction is. I personally often feel it in my gut or I feel it in my chest.

Once you sense where a feeling lives in your body, you can get curious about it. That's a common mindfulness technique. Instead of resisting an emotion, allow it to happen and give it space to evolve. So takeaway two may seem obvious, but it is something we often forget. To keep anxiety in check, remember what's drawing you to your goal.

Art says our motivation to take an action is usually driven by one of two things. We have a distinction in our motivational system between approach motivation and avoidance motivation. Approach motivation is, can I pursue a beautiful, wonderful, desirable thing? And avoidance motivation is, can I avoid some threat, calamity, or catastrophe? On one hand, the dream, you in your new city, living your fabulous new life.

And on the other hand, the nightmare. What if you move and find yourself super lonely and unhappy? Those fears might gather steam the closer your potential move gets. There's research going back to the 1950s on what's called goal gradients. And the idea is that the closer you get to achieving some goal, the closer you get to the goal itself, the stronger your motivation gets.

And the strength of that avoidance motivation goes up faster than the strength of the approach motivation. That makes sense, right? Anxiety might creep up as you get closer to making that big change. It's like, imagine your friend asks if you want to hop on a zipline. And you just think to yourself, "Yeah, it'd be fun. It'd be exciting. I'll be up in the trees. I'll see really interesting things."

And then as you get closer to it, both in time and physically, and you actually climb the stairs, you may find yourself looking down and thinking, yeah, I'm not going to do this because the fear of being in a high place and of falling now outweighs all of that desirable characteristic. So let's say you're thinking about that move and it suddenly feels like you're frozen, not sure if you want to get on that zip line after all.

The key here is to remind yourself of the things that brought you there in the first place. Maybe you want to make a new community of artists and your dream city is known for that. Or it might be the first time in your life you've had the flexibility you'll need to make such a big change. When you're feeling frozen, remind yourself of what brought you up to that proverbial zipline platform in the first place. Flashing forward, let's say you've moved or started that business or went back to school and part of your worry has come to fruition.

One surprising source of help could be your motivational circuits. There's a part of the brain that we share with other mammals called the basal ganglia, which controls our executive function, including the systems that energize us to complete our goals. Art calls this the "go system." Its opposite is, you guessed it, the "stop system." That lives in our orbitofrontal cortex, which is higher in the brain and evolved much later

And in the arm wrestling match between the two systems, the stop function is at a disadvantage. It requires a little bit of mental energy to engage it. It of necessity is less powerful because you'd never want a creature that had a stronger set of brakes than its accelerator. Otherwise, it might never do anything.

And so you can rely on that stop system in the moment on occasion. But if you're truly trying to change your behavior, you don't want to be riding the brakes all the time because they'll wear out basically, similar to the brakes of a car. This is what we might think of as willpower, the ability to deny yourself a behavior. So if you feed a goal into the go system rather than the stop system, you've got a much higher chance of success.

Takeaway three: make it easier on yourself to engage in the new behavior. So if you've moved somewhere new, instead of lecturing yourself about staying in too much, think of easy ways to get out of the house. You might decide to work from the local coffee shop a couple afternoons a week. Becoming a regular is a low-impact way to engage with your new community and ups your chances of random encounters that could lead to new friends.

To be clear, I'm not telling you to completely ignore your inner catastrophizer. Takeaway number four is that you can let yourself visualize the worst case scenario and accept the fact that plans can always evolve. What we want to do is not only think about what could go wrong, but how we're going to respond to it before it even happens. So what are all the things that can go sideways? I'm going to get too busy. I'm going to run out of money.

I'm going to lose a relationship over this. Whatever it is. Okay, what we want to do is teach our brain to walk down that path as far as it can possibly go. Then what would happen? Then what would happen? What would I do? How would I handle that? When we coach folks who are going through leaps, we talk about going through what is the worst that could happen? What are the risks of doing this? They write that out and then that is right there as a tool for them to come back to that.

A lot of times, that anxious part of you worries that if you haven't planned for every possibility, something might blow up in your face. I've definitely been there. So another way to make change a little easier is to remember that you can adapt. If you think about a piece of hardware, whether it's a piece of computer hardware or a television set, that piece of hardware is about as good as it's ever going to be on the day that you take it out of the box. And then it's going to deteriorate.

But software is different. Software we think of as something that's going to evolve. If you buy a new car and the manufacturer immediately issues a recall, you're probably going to trust them less to get things right the next time.

But you buy a piece of software and the next week they patch two bugs, send you an update and add a feature. You don't think to yourself, these software people didn't know what they were doing. You're like, yeah, that's how software works. So think about life changes more like software than hardware. And remember that flaws are to be expected. Giving things space to evolve allows you to get started when you're ready and make improvements along the way. Change does involve a fair amount of uncertainty.

And sometimes in our desire to find that certainty, we'll overcommit to a change. So takeaway five is trust your intuition and keep checking in with yourself. It's really hard on the ego sometimes to be new at something because, well, it's true that you do kind of carry over all of these skills and knowledge and experience from everything else you've been doing. It's also true that when you start something new, you are in a place of not knowing.

It makes total sense to be nervous about a big change. But after a certain point, what might feel unimaginable today will become just your new normal. How about with your move to Portugal? Are you still in the, does it still feel new to you? No. No, although I am changing cities and I don't know, I'm excited about it. Shocker. Yeah. Do you have a sense of when it stopped feeling new? Hmm.

I feel like the... When I stopped expecting to be surprised by anything. And that was...

Maybe six to eight months in. Usually for a new city, it's six months to a year for me to feel comfortable. Yeah, yeah. Most of us know this just through our own experience. You don't really start to get to know someone until the new relationship energy fades down, which is about three to six months typically. That's a really important place to stop and pause and consider whether is the relationship actually sustainable as well as...

fun and exciting when it's new. I will admit I'm a tiny bit guilty of chasing excitement. So I plan things out and then I take those leaks. And usually I'm glad I did. It's an instinct art encourages. Whenever you look back on your life, you tell a story, but that story only makes sense when you're looking back. In the forward direction, things are chaotic. And that means you got to give yourself a break.

You know, you're writing a story as it goes along. Don't edit your life story in the forward direction. You know, having a self-concept that then determines I'm going to do this and not that means that you then edit out things from your life that could have been great stories later. And so when you approach everything with some degree of curiosity, it opens you up to the prospect that life could be far more interesting than you envisioned it to be.

So to recap, takeaway one, before a big change, reflect on why you're doing it and what you hope to get from it. Takeaway two, remember what initially drew you to this life change. Takeaway three, make it easy on yourself to engage in behavior that supports your change. Takeaway four, think about life changes as more like software than hardware and have a plan in case you need any patches. And takeaway five, trust yourself.

And don't edit your life in the forward direction. That was journalist Adjua Jimmabrempa.

For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. There's one on how to budget for a big life change and another on how to try something new. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and want even more, try something new. Subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. Also, we love hearing from you. So if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at lifekit at npr.org.

This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Gharib. Megan Cain is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tegel, Claire Marie Schneider, and Margaret Serino. Engineering support comes from Jimmy Keeley and Patrick Murray. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.

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