Looking Beyond the Stress: Finding Growth in Life’s Changes- Part 1

Change is inevitable, but growth is optional.

We are all familiar with the aphorism: The only constant in life is change. And it is a true-ism that change is inevitable, but growth is optional.  Or said differently: No growth without change. But how we navigate the transitions inherent to the change process will determine whether the result is lasting transformation.

Transition is the inner process of letting go of the old reality and integrating a new identity; and transformation is the personal growth that emerges from that process of releasing and realigning.

Through my work as a life coach, as well as in my own lived experience, I have observed a repeatable pattern of the stages we go through between a shift in the status quo (whether self-initiated or not), and the settling-in at a new place with new, practiced responses, perspectives, and ways of being.

My desire is to share the model that has evolved over many years of life coaching, so as to add to your toolbox for successfully navigating the requisite transitions that come with life’s inevitable changes.

But before I share the dynamic model of the transitions inside of transformation, let me invite you into a personal reflection on an extended season of transitions that over time—though not neatly or painlessly—became transformative for me.

The stage was set: We moved from Ohio, where we had been born, raised, and married, to our dreamland - Durango, Colorado. It was a perfect match for so many of our passions - fly-fishing, mountain biking, Nordic skiing, camping...the list goes on. But a crucial statistic that we unknowingly underestimated became my undoing. Durango is a mountain town that comes with an altitude that will test anyone’s oxygen uptake and delivery systems.

Turns out that for this body, living at 7400 feet was comparable to being high-risk for skin cancer and living in Florida.

What began as some seemingly unrelated bouts of horrific headaches, shoulder and neck pain, nausea, vision and sleep issues, and overall feeling of malaise turned into over a decade of tests and specialists to finally land at the crushing truth: I was dealing with Chronic Mountain Sickness (CMS).  (For my purpose here, I will stay out of the brutally complex journey of diagnosis with all of the accompanying clinical terminology.)

You are probably familiar with the concept of altitude (or climbers’) sickness - where you have these initial symptoms as the body tries to adjust to the drastic cardiopulmonary changes that come with the thin mountain air. Normally, the body acclimates in a few days, and you go back to feeling well. That never happened for me. My body was unable to make the necessary adjustments to alleviate the symptoms that slowly but surely was eating away at my quality of life.

As an Enneagram Type 3, (with the false sense of self => set goals + achieve + perform = be loved), I just kept upping the workout intensity/frequency button and waited for my body to buck up. I lived in ‘press mode’. And no one but my husband saw the true cost - and even he wasn’t awake to observe when I was up all night because of level-nine pain, crying out to God for some relief, some answers, some hope.

I’ll never forget a statement one of my dear friends made when she was asking probing questions about my condition and the picture of my suffering was becoming clearer to her.

You are the healthiest sick person I have ever known!

The sober truth in her exclamation unfolded very slowly for this self-reliant, over-functioning Type 3, so practiced at doing that she barely noticed how deeply she was hurting.  You see, I was still performing in the various quadrants of my life - still running our household while life coaching, entertaining clients and guests, and participating in all of the outdoor activities that had brought us to Colorado. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge my limitations, even to myself, let alone my husband or friends. Just try harder! Buck up! Be positive!

Meanwhile, my prayers were all about being rescued - first from the symptoms. When that didn’t happen in the first ten years of living there, my supplication moved to being rescued from the place of my pain. But as it would happen, all of my husband’s attempts to get a job at a lower altitude ended in closed doors. I had to accept I was staying in this place that made me sick.

It was during this excruciating time of walking out my sentence of living in this paradoxical place, where my paradise had become my prison, that I finally came to the end of myself. I hit the wall, I came unraveled, I was completely flattened. Laid out on the floor next to our bed, I soaked the carpet with my tears and wailed my surrender to the heavens.

Finally, I was ready to turn my focus to what needed to change inside of me - no matter the location of my residence.

What followed was not immediate clarity. It was disorientation. I had surrendered—but I did not yet know who I was becoming. The old self that prided herself on endurance and output was clearly unsustainable, yet the new self had not taken shape. I felt suspended between identities: no longer able to force my body into compliance, but unsure how to live without the engine of performance driving me.

The altitude had not changed. My diagnosis had not changed. My prayers for relocation had not been answered the way I hoped. And so I sat in the in-between—where nothing external shifted, yet something internal was quietly loosening.

There is a peculiar discomfort in that space - liminal space. You are no longer who you were, but you cannot yet articulate who you are becoming. It requires staying present without rushing toward resolution. And that, for someone wired like me, felt like its own form of discipline.

And so, the surrender had come. The softening happened. The receptivity started to form. All of this while my body still punished me for the lack of easy oxygen.

Cliff-hanger alert! ...Stay tuned... In Part 2 next week, I’ll share the rest of this personal story and the Transformation Model, hopefully to encourage and equip you wherever you are on your arrow.

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Blessed to play a part ~

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