How to Be Happy in the Messy Middle
"Change is hard at the beginning, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end." How can we be happy in the "messy middle?" Join me for today's episode of Mindset for Life!

Hey there. Thank you for joining me. This is Bethanie Hansen of the Mindset for Life podcast at DrBCoach.Com. I'm happy you're here. I have been an educator for 28 years now, and a coach for the last seven or eight. I'm very happy to work with you today and also talk with you about the "messy middle."

There's a quote by Robin Sharma: Change is hard at the beginning, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. Well, what is that messy middle, you might be thinking?

That's what we're going to talk about today.

The first step toward any kind of change is awareness. And the fact that we need to change, and we know something must be different.

Perhaps it's our lives, perhaps it's our organization, maybe it's our classroom. Whether you are a leader, a teacher, or a coach, you know that there are all kinds of transitions and changes that you may navigate yourself personally, professionally, and that you might lead others through.

There are so many ways to make this change, and a lot of steps involved. But once we start the change, and we step in the new direction, and we start to get people aware, we map out that journey. We accept what has to happen, and we start to prepare for this road ahead.

Now we've got some trouble along the way, and almost immediately, we question the direction we're headed. We might hit a lot of roadblocks. We might hear people objecting to what we're going to do.
The messy middle is part of change
Let's just take the example of personal change. Have you ever changed anything personally that other people around you objected to? I have some colleagues and friends who used to wear mustaches and beard parts, I guess we call this a goatee. And some of these male friends of mine shaved off their mustache and their goatee all together. So now they look different.

My son showed up at my house this weekend, without his mustache goatee. He's had that facial hair for probably the last five years straight. And all of a sudden, he came to my house with a naked face, he had shaved the mustache on the beard. And I'll admit he looked years younger than himself.

He looked very different. I could see his whole face. I thought it was beautiful as his mother. But I could see that in the professional world, he probably looked very different to customers, to clients, to his co-workers. And actually, it presents a whole different persona, right?

Now that's a somewhat superficial change. But what if your change is going to be deeper? Like, maybe you decide that it's time to really figure out what matters most to you, and you really want to live it at work. And you want to make these changes last for yourself.
Change begins with taking stock, with awareness of the need for change
So you're going to do some kind of a taking stock exercise, like maybe you're going to map out your wellbeing wheel, or your wheel of life, or your professional leadership wheel, you're going to do some kind of inventory that will help you to know what you are doing right now, and to look ahead to decide where your gap is. And once you've discovered the gap between where you are, and where you'd really like to be, ideally, there is some change that's going to have to happen. I work with a lot of clients in my coaching practice where there are some major changes people decide to make.

Some of these changes actually push some people out of their lives and invite in new people.

Some of these changes invite people to change careers altogether. I remember a woman about three years ago. We did a values inventory in session number two, and then I did not see her for like a month and a half, she just seemed to just disappear. And what really happened was, she did that values inventory and immediately connected the d...