In this episode, Austin and I dive into the emotional cycle of change. Whether you're starting a new business or making a big life change, understanding this cycle can make the process easier and more manageable.
Join us as we share our own personal insights and experiences, guiding you through each stage of the emotional cycle. From the initial excitement and passion to the challenging moments of doubt and uncertainty, we offer practical tips to help you push through and come out stronger on the other side.
You'll learn how to:
Keep pushing forward, even in the valley of despair
Become more resilient and see growth in all areas of your life
In this episode, Austin and I dive into the emotional cycle of change. Whether you're starting a new business or making a big life change, understanding this cycle can make the process easier and more manageable.
Join us as we share our own personal insights and experiences, guiding you through each stage of the emotional cycle. From the initial excitement and passion to the challenging moments of doubt and uncertainty, we offer practical tips to help you push through and come out stronger on the other side.
You'll learn how to:
Keep pushing forward, even in the valley of despair
Become more resilient and see growth in all areas of your life
Hello and welcome to the Profitable Nomad Couple podcast. This is a show where we share all of our secrets about building a sustainable, location-independent lifestyle. We are Austin and Monica. We're a digital nomad couple here to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset, ignite your passions, and develop a purpose-driven online business. Get ready for weekly insights and inspiring stories to empower you to live life on your own terms. So are you ready to unlock the nomad mindset and embrace a life of limitless possibilities? Let's dive in. All right, you guys. We are so excited that you're here for another episode of the Profitable Nomad Couple podcast. Today we are going to be talking about the emotional cycle of change, what we go through when we are trying to make a big change in our life. This could be starting a new business or moving to a new place or really just any change that you're making in your life. The purpose of understanding this emotional cycle that we go through is so that it gets easier over time and we know when to lean in and push harder and then we know when to ease up again. We recommend that you Google this, the emotional cycle of change, and look at a graph. We're going to do our best to explain this so that if you're listening and you can't look it up, you understand what we're talking about. But having a visual will definitely help. Like Monica said, it's just really good to identify where you're at in this cycle. So imagine a graph and you have on the X axis, you have time and on the Y axis, you have your emotional state. And then another horizontal line right above the X axis, you've got this line that's separating optimism, which is on the top, and pessimism, which is on the bottom. Okay. So just for the people who are having maybe a hard time visualizing this, it's a right angle, right? And the bottom line, the X axis, is your time. This is how long you've been doing this new activity. And then the vertical line is your emotional state. That's how you're feeling. And about halfway up this vertical line is the line that crosses the threshold from optimism into pessimism. And then on this graph, you have, it kind of looks like a U shape. So imagine a U on this graph, but the right side of the U is a little bit higher than the left side of the U. And we're going to get to why that's important. So the very first stage in this whole emotional cycle is called uninformed optimism. So you start optimistic that you're in the positive realm of emotional state. This is when you first join a new program or you just purchased something new, or maybe you just are arriving into a new city for the first time. So everything's new, everything's exciting. This is where you see all the benefits, but not the challenges so much. You have a very optimistic attitude. You have this, let's do this, I can do it kind of attitude. You don't know exactly what the change looks like quite yet. You know there's going to be change involved, but you're just so gung-ho about it that you're not worried about what it's going to take. You don't know quite yet what's required. And this is a really like blissful place. A lot of people really like this feeling. They really like the new and exciting opportunities out there. But then as they go a little bit further down this timeline, we kind of fall into this place called informed pessimism. And now we've dropped below the line. We're in a negative emotional state and we're really starting to understand the cost of this change that we're trying to make. And so now you're starting to have doubts like, oh, maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe it was better before I tried to make a big change in my life. So maybe you have joined a new program before and you start getting into it. Maybe you're a couple weeks in or a month in and you're starting to realize like the classes are maybe a little bit harder than you thought. Or the change that you're hoping for, like maybe the change was you're going to end up with a certificate or maybe you're going to end up with a new skill. Or maybe if you're living in a new city, this change is going to be you're going to have friends in the area and you're going to know how the bus system works and you're going to know how to order the food. But at this point, like you're starting to realize that goal of getting to that change is maybe a little bit more distant than you thought. Or maybe the work required to get there is harder than you had anticipated. So you've just crossed the border from optimism to pessimism and things are starting to look a little bit more bleak, perhaps. And then you get to kind of the pits. This is stage three called the Valley of Despair. This is not a fun place to be in. You are way down in the depths of pessimism. This is where the pain of change is felt the strongest. And this is where it's the most difficult because the benefits that you were promised or you were expecting when you started, those benefits seem so far off at this point. But what's really poignant and highlighted are the pains of change, you know, what it takes to change the effort that you're having to put in. So this is where you look back and you can see where you started in the uninformed optimism stage and you can look back at that and think life was so much easier before. Like I wish I had stayed there. That's where I want to be now. And this is the most critical part of the whole emotional cycle because at this point you have one of two choices. So you can either go back in time, not literally, obviously, but what I mean by that is you can either quit and go back and start something new. And this is the epitome of the shiny object syndrome. Once you get to this point of change and it's really difficult, you want to give up on that and then you want to find something new that works, find something else that's going to do what you want, but it's going to be, you know, quote unquote, easier or you think it's going to be easier. So that's option one. You keep looking for the other things to solve your problem and then you get stuck in the cycle of repeating phases one through three. You know, you're optimistic about it and it's all brand new and exciting and then it gets tough and you just cycle through that again. Or option two at this point is to push through this valley of despair. Obviously in the moment, this is the more difficult thing to do to push through this. It takes action. Like we've talked about how important it is to take action, messy action and perfect action, but you know, that's what it takes to get through this. We definitely suggest like we've talked before about recording your why, you know, why you want to travel, why you want to start an online business. This is the point that it becomes so important. When you think about quitting and you want to give up, remember why you started. So if you have that recorded, this is the time to go back and read it. Remind yourself why you started this journey in the first place. Yeah, by making the choice to quit in this moment while you're in the valley of despair and go back to phase one to where you're starting something new, you get this really false sense of a high. Things start to feel good again. Things start to feel exciting. You feel like you're on the right path and then you kind of slip back down and eventually end up in the valley of despair again and you'll start to feel like maybe something is wrong with you and it's a really dangerous cycle to get caught up in. But if you take the action to push through the valley of despair, you'll find yourself in a place called informed optimism. Now this is about, this feels about as good as stage one, right? You feel this positive emotion. You are excited. Your new thoughts and actions have become part of your routine. You're starting to build momentum. You start to see some success and you are excited about it again. And with the added benefit of you are very proud of yourself because you've made it through the valley of despair. Yeah, it feels good to be at this point. You've crossed the line from pessimism to optimism, so things are definitely looking up. about what it takes to go through this journey. So using the examples that we've been giving so far, let's say you're living in a new city, like now you through that trough and you're not quite at the point where you know, you consider it a success, but you know a lot more than you did before. You know a lot more of the area, you know, more people maybe have a friend or two. It's just a, it's a much safer, happier place to be in. And your momentum is building all the way till stage five, which is success and fulfillment. And remember I said at the beginning that it's kind of a U-shaped graph and the right side of the U is a little bit higher than the left side. So at this point, you're in an even better emotional state than you were when you started. You've gone through a lot of change at this point. You've become a new person as you've gone through this whole process. So the cost of change is essentially gone. You've made it to the end of this part of your journey. Your actions are a little bit more routine. You're comfortable with where you are. And this is the point I really want to drive home. This is the whole reason that it's worth pushing through that trough. And instead of quitting and repeating cycles or stages one through three, it's important to push through to the end of the cycle because completing the cycle and ending here as success and fulfillment is what builds your confidence and your capacity to grow more. You're going to be more sure of yourself, more confident. You're going to have more evidence to prove to yourself that you can do hard things, that you can do things that are difficult, that you can change and become a different person. And that's just going to make it easier the next time you go through something new and something difficult. It's going to make that much easier to fulfill that. Yeah, and the more times you complete the cycle, the more times that you are striving for growth and going through the valley of despair and coming through the other side successful, the easier it's going to be and the less time you're going to spend in the valley of despair. And every time you do this, you're going to evolve and you're going to become a better version of yourself. And you're going to see more success both socially, financially, spiritually, all the ways. So successful, you're going to feel really good of yourself. And at the end of the day, you're going to be proud of the person that you're becoming. Yeah, you definitely build a lot of resilience and it bleeds that resilience bleeds into every facet of your life. And I love this quote. I think it's a Rob Dial quote, but I'm not 100% positive. He said, it's impossible not to succeed if you keep pushing and continuing taking action. When you're in that trough and you're in that valley of despair, think about that. All you need to do is continue pushing, continue taking action. And that's hard because sometimes you feel like the action has to be perfect. Sometimes you think if it's not going to be everything I want, I might as well not do it at all. But I mean, for me, it's a beautiful thing that it doesn't have to be perfect. It shouldn't be perfect. All you have to do, when you're in that valley of despair, sometimes it's just one small step forward. Maybe it's like a little shuffle forward. As long as you don't stop moving forward and moving towards your goal, moving towards that success and fulfillment that you're aiming for, it's impossible not to succeed. You're not going to not get there. Yeah. And maybe the action you take is simply just recognizing like, hey, I am in this valley of despair. I've been here for a while. I really want to give up. I'm going to hire a mentor. Maybe it's just something as simple as just reaching out and saying, hey, I need some help. And that's all it's going to take to get the momentum rolling again and to help you start to climb back out of that valley onto the road to success. Yeah. I just want to share a super quick and experience that kind of goes through all of these points for you. When I first moved to Paraguay, I was living there as a missionary for my church. And you definitely have that euphoric beginning where you're like, everything's new and exciting and you just can't wait to get started and you can't wait to see what the country's like and what the people are like. And I learned that I was going to be learning Spanish there, which is super exciting. And then I also learned that they speak Guarani in Paraguay, which is like extra exciting. So I was stoked out of my mind. You get there and then you start realizing like the Spanish that I learned on my phone at home or the Spanish that I learned in high school is not the Spanish they're speaking here. You know, and so a couple days and a couple of weeks go by and you realize like, I can't communicate with anybody. And I had a hard time because I couldn't talk to the people there like I wanted to. There were a lot of new things. And I feel like that drop off into the valley of despair, it can be steeper for some people. Sometimes you feel like you're plummeting to the valley of despair. Sometimes it's a gradual decline. But I feel like it's almost inevitable with something, some big change. But then I remember, I think it was about, I don't know, maybe four months into this when I feel like I had pushed through it enough to be on back on the optimism side. That's when I felt like I could finally start speaking to the people I knew enough Spanish that I could have genuine conversations with people. And I felt more comfortable with the areas that I was in and the food I was eating and, you know, navigating the streets. And I just think the experiences that have come from that, like if I had given up and gone home or stopped trying, like there's so many beautiful people that I met, beautiful experiences that I had in the last 18 months that I was there, 20 months that I was there that I never would have had if I hadn't pushed through that valley of despair. I think Monique and I both had a lot of experiences like that, both in our travels and in our business especially. And I guess all I can say is it's 1000% worth pushing through that valley to get to that success and fulfillment on the other side. Yeah, I really don't know who needs to hear this right now. But if you are in that valley and you're looking at those two choices and quitting seems really good, we just encourage you to lean in. Just keep going, just a little bit longer. Just keep taking that imperfect messy action and you will find before you know it, you're going to be climbing back out of that valley. And if you are in that valley and you are having a really hard time and you just can't see the way out, please reach out to us. We would be happy to chat with you and talk you through where you're at and how to get back out. Thanks so much for joining us here on the profitable Nomad Couple podcast. We appreciate you listening to us today. If you enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and be sure to tag us at Austin and Monica. Together, we can inspire others to embrace a location independent lifestyle. And while you're there, we'd love to connect with you. So make sure you follow us for more tips and inspiration on living your dream location independent lifestyle. Until next week, remember that you have the power to shape your own path. So stay curious, stay adventurous and stay connected.