Three Signs You Are Ready To Make A Life Change

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Tonya Echols, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Am I where I want to be?

Am I at least headed in the right direction?

Simple questions, but they often require soul-searching answers. Especially if you are in a situation where the answers could turn your life upside down. However, it could be time to realize that you may already be living upside down. In that case, change may really be a way of setting things right.

Think of an hourglass. It starts out full of sand, but as time passes, the sand slowly settles to the bottom. Eventually, all the sand empties from the top vessel and, well, that’s it. What once felt like the right thing to do has left you sitting at the bottom surrounded by sand. That’s how easy it is to get caught up in a stagnant, perhaps even destructive, situation without realizing it. The crazy thing is, while it may not feel like it, you’re actually upside down. The only way to get things moving again is to turn the hourglass over. Even if it means you have to do some rocking and banging around to get things moving.

How do you know if you are ready for change?

Whatever is looming heavily over your life, a relationship, a job, where you live or even how your feel about yourself, we all have our own personal frame of reference for knowing what the tipping point is.

You’ve stopped doing your best:

We all get enjoyment out of giving our best to something we truly care about. If you are involved in something (or even someone) you love, the natural tendency is to give 100%+ of yourself to make it as good, successful and/or happy as it can be. But when you lose that spark, that need to put forth your best effort, the impact of doing things halfway is visible not only in the end result, but in you. YOU aren’t happy because you know that you didn’t put forth the best. Even worse? You are sad and guilty that deep down, you know you don’t care enough about it in the first place to try to do better. You hear that? That’s sound of the gears warming up to start a vicious cycle.

Dread has taken over your enjoyment of life:

Now that the cycle is in full gear, that’s usually about the time that the guilt, stress, sadness and boredom all come together to create a cloud of dread that follows you through your day. Well that’s just peachy. You hate your job, so your actually start to dread going home because that means in 12 hours you have to leave it and go right back again. You sit at your child’s gymnastics class distracted because you are dreading the argument that is brewing with your increasingly not-so-significant other…again. You wake up in the middle of the night stressed about the state that your life is in. You stop buying new clothes or you won’t go out with your friends and loved ones in public because you are self-conscious about how you look.

If something in your life is so soul-sucking that you can’t enjoy your own home, family or private time, either it needs to go, or you need to adjust how you respond to it. If not, the next logical step is anger. Anger at yourself. Anger at the person in front of you at Starbucks for being so dang chipper. Anger at anyone and anything that seems to be getting some joy out of life. What’s their deal being so happy all the time right in front of you?

The idea of being in the same place a year from now makes you want to cry:

I mean literally cry. Go in your closet, sit on the floor and cry. The soul-sucking comment wasn’t for dramatic purposes. When your life is upside down, you feel like you are standing on your head and walking on your hands 24/7. There isn’t enough yoga or strength training in the world that will make anyone strong enough to withstand that kind of pressure forever. Or even another 365 days. If the mere thought that your life will be in the same state it is in right now makes you want to crawl into bed and never come out, again, there is something that has to change.

When you stop caring, enjoying and engaging in your life, are you really living it? There are too many opportunities for happiness in the world to stay in a place where your idea of a good day is to be uncomfortably numb.

Ultimately, everyone has to make that final decision to make a change for themselves. No one has the magic answer of where your “Fed Up” point is at any given time. All we can do is be self-aware and honest with ourselves about where we are in our lives and how that makes us feel. What we do with that information, well, that’s up to each of us to figure out.

One way or the other, life will change. However, our choices and actions (or inaction) will impact whether we have some say in how or when that change occurs.

Do you want to be the one to turn that hourglass over, or have someone else do it for you?

If you are sitting in the middle of a tough time right now and aren’t sure what to do about it, I will suggest one thing. Go out today, yes TODAY, and do one thing that makes you completely happy. Go the gym. Play with your kids. Get together with a friend. Go to a movie. Light some candles and take a bath. Have a date night. Anything that will give you a respite from the negativity.

If nothing else, that seemingly simple thing may be what you need to remind yourself what it feels like to be happy.

And that’s a good place to start.