Recalibrating After Major Disruption Is a Major Opportunity

We are creatures of habit. All of us. Sure, some of us like spontaneity, improvisation, and consider ourselves to be 'unpredictable', but when you boil right down to the core, even being consistently unpredictable is habitual. Even though I, personally, welcome change and embrace it – I am no exception to this statement.

Recently my routine has been turned upside down. It was one of those massive changes that were predictable . . . to get personal for just a minute: when you are pregnant, you just know that your life at the end of the pregnancy is going to change. It is a no-brainer. And not just your life – the lives of all those in your nuclear core as well as those in the ever-expanding concentric circles outside the core.

Pregnancy is one of those events in which your previous routines can never go back to what they were. I am not talking about the obvious –eat, sleep routines that take time with a newborn, I am talking about the big things:

– Your major relationships suddenly need to shift to allow for the new addition

– Your prioritisation of professional and personal commitments and activities needs to be redefined

– Your planning – whether it be long, middle or short-term – needs to be realigned

The cards are completed shuffled. Essentially one is left building a new routine, or, as I like to think of it – re-establishing the balance or homeostasis that we all tend to seek. At first we may flail and struggle to reach this point, but ultimately we will get there, (or so we should).

Like with all change, there is an opportunity in complete disruption. Complete disruption forces us to examine what is important. It compels us to realign first on a primal level and then it frees us to realign and recalibrate on the level of self-actualisation (consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs). Where am I now? Where do I want to be? What will enable me to reach that point?

There is no two ways about it, we are unlikely to affect real change when our lives are comfortable and flowing. Why would we? Why upset the balance? It is when we 'have no choice' that we are forced to ask ourselves the big questions and to take major action. Along with the turbulence, uncertainty and anxiety of major disruption, comes major opportunity to challenge the routine and rework it in a way that you couldn't have previously imagined.

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