Is your life about to change? This is the easiest way to tell.
It may come through an email. Or a phone call. Or a face-to-face chat. But one day, you encounter a bit of news that leaves you dumbstruck. Once the initial shock wears off, reality sets in slowly. Soon, you feel a wash of joy and elation at this monumental shift you will soon experience, or perhaps dread. This news will open doors to unchartered waters in your life, expand your horizons and give you a great deal of satisfaction and a fair share of new worries along the way.
Now, this news can be a job offer which you didn’t expect to get or a chance to meet your lifelong role model. It can be a chance to study in the program of your ideal choice or business opportunity that will give a fantastic payoff. But it has major ramifications for your life and career. Change has come.
Yet, if we scratch the surface of the announcement, it becomes clear that this announcement didn’t come from nowhere, like a lottery, but was a product of time. Much as a baby is born through the course of a pregnancy, this change was born from factors that were operating for a period before delivering.
Life Changes in Two Ways
We experience noteworthy shifts in our life either suddenly or incrementally. Sudden changes, such as the loss of a loved one or a car accident or a chance meeting with someone destined to be our life partner, happen without warning. As much as we would like to insure ourselves from unexpected events and their consequences, we must accept that we will always be at the mercy of Acts of God that can rupture our life in positive and negative ways.
Other key moments of change in our life are culminations of wider undercurrents. Some of these are intentional, such as consistent effort being applied to pursue a stated goal, climbing a hill step by step. Other may be operating in the background but one day hit you like a ton of bricks, such as suddenly being told of an illness by your doctor which is the result of years of neglect of your nutrition and exercise.
While one type of change moment is completely unpredictable, the other can be anticipated based on our own observation. So what to look out for?
Look for Alignment
Similar to how the sides of the road seem to meet at the horizon in the distance, so too do factors in your life seem to converge at a point of change in the future. Those of you who are planners will have mapped out these factors and shifted their compass accordingly. But many of us fail to reflect on how change may be creeping upon us. The question is what factors to look for?
The first factor is personal. Where are your interests diverting you to? Where is your time being focused on inevitably? What parts of your personal life are going to demand attention in the time ahead?
The other factors are circumstantial or environmental. What outside elements are influencing you and pulling and pushing you in different directions? Is there something looming in the long term that you may be ignoring now?
Scanning your life for these factors will be the first steps towards realizing if you are reaching alignment. Alignment is when the priorities in your life begin to synchronize with the opportunities and resources at your disposal. The process of alignment continues until it reaches your own tipping point, when change manifests itself.
When you are sensing that the forces in your life are coalescing in one direction, that is the sign that significant change is inevitable and it is just a matter of when and how. So next time when you feel your stars are aligning in a particular way, ask what milestone is awaiting you.
