The Instability Zone: Why Wanting Change Isn’t Enough

Change doesn’t fail because you don’t want it badly enough. It fails when your system is overwhelmed and survival is running the show. 

In this episode, I break down one of the most misunderstood phases of change: the Instability Zone. This is the first episode in a three-part series discussing the three zones of change. Here, in the Instability Zone, we focus on what happens when change is imposed, rather than chosen. 

Layoffs. Health diagnoses. Caregiving. Institutional collapse. The moments when urgency is loud, clarity is gone, and everyone keeps asking what you’re going to do next.

If you’ve ever felt frozen, panicked, exhausted by decisions you haven’t even made yet, or ashamed that you “should know what's next by now,” this episode will give you language for what’s actually happening. More importantly, it will tell you what not to do—and what does help—when you’re in true instability.

This episode is for anyone navigating abrupt, identity-shaking change and wondering why motivation, confidence, or future-thinking feel completely out of reach right now.

In This Episode:

• Why change is a process, not a single decision—and why desire alone can’t override instability
• How to recognize when you’re in the Instability Zone (hint: urgency without clarity)
• What’s really happening psychologically when your brain cannot manage to think about the future
• How grief disguises itself as urgency and drives panic-driven decisions 
• The difference between what ended and what didn’t—and why that distinction matters
• Why orientation comes before pivoting, rebranding, or “figuring it out”
• How rushing decisions in instability often makes change harder, not faster

START HERE: The Personal Change Pattern Assessment

Discover the unique psychological pattern keeping you stuck in the same status quo. In under 5 minutes, you’ll see which psychological patterns most often keep you stuck—overthinking, over-adapting, second-guessing—so you can choose your next move with accuracy.

***FED Impact Coaching***

Coaching for current or former employees in federal or adjacent fields whose roles, identity, or sense of stability have been disrupted by government restructuring.

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For women who know something needs to change and are ready to stop circling the decision.

***The REALignment Private Coaching Experience (3 or 6 Months)***

For women already mid-transition who want support integrating change in every aspect of their lives, not just initiating it.

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Transcript

Welcome to this episode of Change Ology. Today we're going to talk about the true nature of change.

Most people believe that they're stuck or they haven't been able to change because they don't want it badly enough. The truth is that you can want change really deeply and still be unable to move, and that paralysis does not mean that you're lazy, that you're avoidant, that you're incompetent, or that you're afraid of growth or change.

You see, change isn't a single decision. It's a process and it occurs in different zones, and you can think about these change zones as being kind of like territories or geographies even. Each zone is different, and within each zone, change presents itself differently. Each change zone also presents unique limitations within it.

So desire does play a role in change, but it's rarely the sole deciding factor. And as strong as desire can be, it really isn't strong enough to override stress or grief or profound instability. So wanting change is rarely the problem, but forcing a clarity or forcing actions that aren't yet accessible, that is usually the problem.

So change really isn't about motivation or your level of desire, it's about how your psychological system is organized at a given moment within a given context. So if that feels a little abstract, sorry about that. Stick with me because in today's episode I'm going to offer a really simple way to understand this concept.

Having worked with clients who are navigating all sorts of different kinds of change from career pivots to cross country moves to divorce, to, you know, the transition into parenthood, I've learned that people move through. Change in these three different zones. So this is the first episode in a three part series that will describe these three different change zones.

And in this series we're going to talk about each zone, its characteristics and how change actually presents itself within each zone. And these zones are absolutely not linear. That's why I really encourage you to think about them as being almost unique geographies, because they really aren't like you.

You don't travel through one to get to another necessarily, right. It's not linear and it's something that you, you know, you don't graduate from them, right? They're just discreet.and I've named each of the zones for what it's like to be inside of that zone. So today we are going to start this conversation with change zone number one, the instability zone.

Let's tuck in. Okay? The first. Zone, the first change zone is the instability zone, and this is where change is happening to you, and things feel very unstable because of that. So you know you're here in the instability zone when the change at hand was not your idea. When something important has shifted without your consent, and now your energy is going toward managing the fallout from that shift.

sometimes it's when people start asking, Ooh, so what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do now? And you just literally want to disappear into a hole or scream at them. You may be here if you feel. Urgency, and this is a big, big one, a huge sign that you're in. The instability zone is when urgency feels intolerably loud, but clarity is nowhere to be seen.

You have absolutely no idea what to do next, but you feel this incredible sense of urgency to make a decision. And your instinct when you're in the instability zone is to fix it all quickly. If you lost your job, it's updating the resume, applying for everything you can find, making a big decision. Right?

And all of this is in an effort to stop the discomfort that you're feeling, and you might be exhausted by these decisions you haven't even made yet. Right? And you're probably focusing on. The, the immediacy of your problem, you're not focusing on anything beyond the intensity of right now. Right. And you probably know deep down that you shouldn't necessarily rush, but another part of you is deeply terrified of being still of, of stagnation, right.

And on top of all of it, the instability zone usually comes with a heavy dose of self-judgment for all of it, right? So judging yourself for not being able to think clearly, for not being able to be motivated to, to do the next thing for not knowing what you want yet. Like you're really hard on yourself for all of these things, but.

If this sounds familiar, you are probably smack in the middle of the instability zone, but nothing has gone wrong. Nothing is broken. This is what it looks like when your system is prioritizing survival. Okay, so inside the instability zone, change is experienced as a threat. It's an instability factor and your psychological systems, your brain, your nervous system, they're prioritizing, protecting you from further instability, right?

This can be anything from layoffs to an unexpected health diagnosis, to caring for someone at the end of their life or being in a caretaker role. Being a parent, financial stress, institutional chaos, all of these things pile on top of the stressor, and that is what makes change feel like a huge threat, right?

You're here, you're in survival mode, either on one or multiple fronts of your life, your career, your relationships, end of life, things like, you know, developmental stages like menopause or resin just pile on, right? So in the instability zone, you actively do not want things to change anymore. In fact, your psychological system, your brain is doing absolutely everything in its power to reject further change, and all of your energy is going towards stabilization and damage control.

When you're in the instability zone, you want nothing more than stability and safety and predictability and order, right? Change in this zone is threatening and it represents the diametric opposite of those primary needs in this instability zone, right? Change represents instability, it represents risk, it represents unpredictability, and it is truly, change is on some level disruption, right?

So when people are in the instability zone, they often think that they should somehow, given all of this, be able to think clearly about options for the future. And they feel really ashamed that they can't, that they can't get there. Right?but I, I want you to hear me on this. Being unable to think clearly about your future when you're in the instability zone is totally normal because your brain is trying to protect you from what it perceives as a threat.

And that is whatever change is happening when you're here. Your brain and your nervous system are doing their job by narrowing your attentional focus to really, really focus on the problem at hand, right? It's literally all you can think about, and that is by design. It is your brain trying to protect you and stave off any other kind of destabilizing elements that could arise, right?

It wants you to be vigilant and that hyper vigilance is. A signal of being in survival mode. And when you are in survival mode, clarity about your next steps is a pure luxury. Most people can't get there. When you're in the instability zone, it's, it's really, really hard to interrupt this system, this protocol that's designed to keep you protected.

So what can you do when you are inside the instability zone?

The work here is stabilization and stabilization can look like clarifying what your actual reality is. And I don't know about you, but when I'm in the instability zone, my brain is firing off all of these different worst case scenarios and almost shock that this is even happening. Right? What reality is, is clarifying what actually ended, right?

What ended if you got a terrible diagnosis, what actually ended? If you lost your job? What ended was it? A role? Was it part of your identity? Was it the future story or narrative that you had written for yourself and that you expected to, to kind of adhere, to define what actually ended? And this helps bring reality into focus, right?

And it, it helps you get rid of all the specters of all the other really scary scenarios that your brain is trying to, to prevent from happening. Clarifying what reality is also entails, describing what did not end. Okay, you lost your job. Do you still have your values? Do you still have your capacity? Do you still have your skills?

Do you still have your agency? Those are really important things to understand and to claim again after some kind of big change. This is also the kind of work we need to do when we identify where grief is showing up as urgency and grief often manifests itself this way. And remember, grief is a. Any distance between how you expected things to look or how you expected things to go, and how they actually are going.

Right? So if you always wanted to have a big family and you find out that you can't have kids, that's fucking grief, because there's difference between what you wanted, how you saw things going, and the current reality, right? So really grief happens in all sorts of different scenarios, right? And particularly with job loss or particularly with, health diagnoses, things like that, when grief shows up as urgency, that is a means that your brain is trying to escape the grief.

Okay.this could be, I'm gonna focus on job loss because that's something that's going on, around us a lot right now, especially in the United States. Urgency could look like jumping into the next thing, right? Or burying yourself in some kind of distraction. So this hidden grief stage is where I see a lot of people make panic driven decisions out of fear, right?

And this perceived urgency that they end up really regretting later that's racing to find a poor fit job or mass applying to things you actually don't really wanna do. Right? And again, I just wanna underscore that this is normal. It's a protective response. This is your brain trying to stave off further danger, right?

But it is not optimal. Normal. Yes, optimal not so much. You don't want to go from the frying pan to the fire, as my mother would say. So what do we do? Okay. We know that grief in this stage, in the instability zone often manifests itself as urgency, and that urgency drives us to make decisions that aren't good for us in the long term.

So our first move in the instability zone is to move through the emotional intensity. The urgency that we're feeling stabilizing our narrative. What is the reality here? What is genuinely going on? Not what do I feel? What do I perceive? What is actually going on? Then we have to legitimize and grieve what ended.

Do not skip this step. Grief will come and kick you in the ass when you least expect it. If you skip this step, you must pay attention here to your grief. That will help you quiet the urgency that will kind of numb the, the edge of it, and it will help you reclaim the narrative and shift your authority back inward, and that's where it belongs.

Right? I have seen this pattern emerge for several clients lately, right? They get laid off and they find themselves along with so many other people needing a new job. On top of that, they feel like they have, you know, quote unquote nothing to show for their decades of effort and service. Plus, there's a real time pressure and urgency to find another job.

Financial pressure is real, so they throw themselves into finding a new job that, you know, is adjacent to something that they lost or, utilizes skills from the, former position, but they find themselves. Among thousands of others in the same boat, and they feel like they're competing for the same one or two open positions.

And then they come to me and they're super frustrated and paralyzed because it feels fucking impossible. So for example, just to put a finer point on this one, client's position within the federal government in the United States was terminated. In fact, her entire. Kind of, sub-agency was terminated and she spent several months spinning her wheels trying to find and apply for new jobs within the federal government or within the local government that were, you know, around the same topic.

and she was competing with other former federal workers for the same one or two positions, and it was slim pickings. And she came to me and she was panicked. But one of the first things that we did together was to identify what really ended for her and for her. It wasn't only her job, her position, it was an entire program that she had built from the ground up.

It no longer existed. That is fucking heavy and that is grief. So part of the work for her was to take that time to grieve what ended in a structured way. And for us, that was in sessions. she got to sob about it. She got to get really angry and scream about it. whatever she needed to do to process that grief for what she expected the rest of her career and working life to look like.

And we talked through it in sessions. She had some homework, some things to think about, some things to really reflect on, and incrementally, as she began to acknowledge and sit with and move through her grief, she began to create space for clear thinking, and that is the goal here. It was only then that she was able to kind of.

Look at her skillset and identify what set her apart to kind of name and claim her, her legacy, and begin to understand how all of those pieces could fit together in a new and different way. And she was even able to access the part of herself that had always been interested in doing more research based work, whereas her former position was an applied position, right?

Perhaps she could entertain nonprofit work or something like that. So she's still not making any huge decisions right now, but she's able to more clearly think about options. The point here is that she was not only able to take stock of her situation, she could then see new paths forward. But only after she'd taken that time to create stability first.

So stability can look different for different people for different contexts, right? So maybe if you've lost your job to keep with the same kind of change that we've been talking about this episode, maybe it's getting a barista job or bagging groceries for a few months while you take stock to kind of alleviate some of that financial pressure.

But whatever you decide to do, you cannot skip this step, this stabilization step, or else you run the risk of making really poor fit decisions for yourself in the long term, you risk becoming extremely overly frustrated. That honestly puts people off, especially in a job search context, right, and ultimately run the risk of.

The whole process taking far, far longer than if you'd taken time to do that stabilization work before jumping into the next thing, and I want to say this clearly, especially for those of you whose careers or institutions are currently in upheaval, especially federal workers in the United States, contractors, people in mission driven systems, your work now is not what's next.

Your work is orientation. It's where am I really? For some people that orientation process happens slowly on its own life. Stabilizes, they kind of kind of sink into their new reality, right? For other people, especially when that change was imposed and when it was abrupt and brutal and tied to. Identity and values and real tendency towards service, right?

It, it helps to have more structured support that slows that urgency and restores trust before decisions are made. You have to trust yourself and you have to trust the outside world a little bit to move forward. So this is exactly why I created my Federal Impact coaching container, and this is specifically for people who have been impacted by the reduction in force in the United States federal government and supporting agencies when change is imposed at an institutional or even, you know, country level, right?

The work is not about pivoting or rebranding yourself right away. That comes later. It may feel like that's the wise thing to do right now, or like the only thing you can do. But first, the work in the instability zone is orientation and slowing that desperate urgency that you feel this kind of orientation work helps you understand what ended.

But it also helps you understand what didn't end. And again, these are your values, your contacts, your network, your skills. It's about becoming resourced enough to take a beat and sit and observe and understand, okay? And it's about not rushing to make fear-based choices that you'll regret again later, right?

It's about restoring your own internal agency and decision-making ability, and you can't do that if you are in true instability. Okay, so the Federal Impact Coaching container is specifically for those people who need support stabilizing themselves before choosing what's next. If you're interested in that, there's links in the show notes, so you can take advantage of that if that's of interest to you.

Okay, so let's wrap up the instability zone. If you recognize yourself in the instability zone, here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Nothing has gone wrong because you can't think clearly yet. You're not broken because you don't feel motivated or like you don't know what you want to do next, and you are not behind because you are focused on making it through the fucking day.

Okay? All of this is normal. Your system is doing exactly what it's designed to do when the rug is unceremoniously ripped from beneath you. This is not the time for you to focus on making major decisions about your future. This is the time for stabilization, for grieving, what ended and for quieting that sense of urgency.

Enough for your own agency to reemerge. And if that is where you are, let that be. Okay? Let it be okay that you're here. So that's all I've got for the instability zone. But if you have any questions about the instability zone or how to move through it, please, please reach out to me. Send me a text via the widget in your podcast app, or you can message me on my socials, or you can even email me meg@megtruca.com.

And I read and answer every single one of them. So next episode, we are going to start talking about the second change zone, which is called the Tension Zone, and I think a lot of people find themselves in this zone. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Change Ology, and I will see you in the next one.