Pain and stress always come before the new life
I am personally going through some transitions this year that are scary and Awesome at the same time. My wife is pregnant with our fourth child so you will be getting many a birthing metaphor in this article. My company Success Freaks has taken my life to new levels over and over again already this year. I realized somewhere in the process that 2013 is the year in which the way my finances comes to me changes. And to be honest, I don’t know what that means. I see all the signs that a major life change is coming and that is what I am going to share with you.
I started January off with a bang at the New Media Expo. It really set the tone for this year to be centered around Success Freaks. However, there was a major universal shoe drop while I was there. A friend of mine called me and let me know that my company was outsourcing my department to India. For those of you new to me, I make my living working for a company from home. I still put in 40 to 50 hours a week at a job to get a paycheck, and while I was celebrating some great moments in my dream path, I got a blow in my stable money life.
So as you can imagine in the weeks to come there was information searching through my company to find out what my money future looked like, soul searching to find out how I felt about it, and long conversations with the wife. I knew it would be perfectly ok, but as a human it stresses me out. I knew one day in the near future I would transition from the current job into Success Freaks full time, but I don’t know when. I saw a clear vision of changes this year in the way I generate income and I felt good about it. I knew it could be in many different ways – the exciting includes Success Freaks generating enough income to sustain me, working for my church as the new media tech guy, other audio gigs I have momentum in, or any combination therein. Not so exciting includes simply losing my income without a solid landing. But that isn’t what I am here to write about tonight.
Where I stand now feels somewhat like birthing pains. See, when you are moving to the next stage of life, you are pulling away from this one. As I am drawn to work on Success Freaks projects it becomes harder to focus on the work that pays my bills. That alone brings its own form of stress. On top of this feeling, my wife and I know that my income will be restricted as I am off to help with the baby. Life feels compressed, uncomfortable, stressed, and painful. And as I sat discussing this with my very pregnant wife tonight the imagery hit me. We have been in the early stages of pregnancy with the excitement of the new life to come. By that I am referring to the change in my income to living the dream.
We both know new and great things are to come that will change us for the better. We have both been visualizing how the dream job nursery could be decorated, getting small glimpses of what it will be like to work full time as a Success Freak everywhere, and overall just excited by all the new unknowns. Then as the dream pregnancy progressed and got bigger, we started to feel some of the tiredness you get when cultivating a new life. Now everything in my life points out change is imminently on the doorstep – and it is becoming uncomfortable. The reality of the new unknowns are beginning to set in and stress us out. In reality giving birth is painful. The afterglow erases the negativity of the pain and makes everything new and awesome, but getting there takes a price.
Even as a Success Freak I tend to forget that to gain something new we have to lose something old. I know the reality of starting a new business where you depend on it for income is difficult. Yet when I see more and more signs daily that I will lose my paycheck, it becomes harder to remember that is a good thing. I have never had anything work out fairy tale style. I have never left one income and smoothly moved into a more rewarding one. Every major transition in my life has required its share of stress and pain. And I thought I should be honest about it with you.
I know that everything works out in perfect time for my life because it always has. I know that in order to move towards the dream I have to let go some of the anchors of the known. And I still feel the natural fear and anxiety that comes with all of it. Just as I know that while during labor your whole world is focused on that pain, after the new life is birthed, all the pain and stress instantly disappear. As a father of soon-to-be four and speaking from my knowledge of my wife, I can tell you it is always worth it. Just remember as you focus on your next stage of life that when the pain starts to come you know you are almost there.