Why real change feels weird, unfamiliar and wrong

This was originally published on my newsletter

We all have habitual patterns in every domain of life. We move, talk, think and feel in the same kinds of ways that we once learned were good and useful. Eventually, though, it becomes clear that those ways aren’t always the most constructive ones. The tracks that once guided a train somewhere it was needed later constrain it from adapting to a world that has changed around it.

Of course, we are not trains. We do have the capacity to step out of past conditioning, but as anyone who has consciously attempted it can attest, it’s a difficult project. One of the reasons for this is that doing something truly new—actually moving off those habitual tracks—feels like some combination of weird, unfamiliar and wrong.

What we do all the time comes to feels familiar, and what is familiar comes to feel right, natural and the way things are simply supposed to be. The problem is that it’s easy to use that internal sense of what feels right to guide behaviour. There’s a kind of safety in the familiar: it’s known, mapped territory from which it feels like chaos has been expelled. It’s the comforting sense of being at home, even if home also happens to be a chaotic mess. Better the devil you know, and all that.

One of my habits is to have a small amount of caffeine to start my day and when I want to feel motivated and invested in what I’m working on. On closer inspection, though, caffeine has the opposite effect on me: it makes me scattered and anxious about the things I’m not getting done because I’m too scattered. Even knowing this, it’s really difficult to learn my lesson and just cut it out completely, in part because sitting at my desk with a herbal tea in the morning just doesn’t feel right.

If I use that internal feeling of familiarity and rightness as a compass, I will, almost by definition, keep orienting towards my habitual patterns of thought and behaviour. Doing anything in a non-habitual way, like tying your shoelaces with a new technique, just feels somehow wrong, at least until it becomes familiar, at which point it starts to feel right again.

The trick is to learn to stay with the experience of unfamiliarity even in the face of the internal pressure to return ‘home’ to familiarity; to notice that urge to resolve the tension and instead stay with the dissonance of the new. The fact that something is unfamiliar is a good sign that it’s new, because it hasn’t already been mapped as a thing you do all the time.

While I’ve talked about this at an individual scale, I suspect it holds true at higher levels of organisation. How many decisions within businesses are taken because they’re the most constructive option versus being the one that feels right, both to the decision makers and to the culture of the organisation as a whole? How much of politics is just being able to read the mood of what would feel right to the public and then giving them that, or at least framing what they’re doing in language that avoids feeling wrong to voters?

For as long as this dynamic goes under-recognised, it makes the job of effecting meaningful change, whether personally or collectively, much more challenging than it otherwise needs to be. “You are going to feel a little uncomfortable and that’s a good thing” can be a bitter pill to swallow if you immediately equate the experience of the unfamiliar with pain or if the person telling you this hasn’t earned some level of trust.

One thing I want to emphasise here though is the difference between something feeling weird, in the unfamiliar sense, and feeling weird in the bad sense. I want to encourage you to spend more time in the unfamiliar, but I absolutely do not want to encourage you to spend more time in the bad. If something feels bad, stop.

When I sometimes do hands-on Alexander Technique lessons—and, surprise! this is Alexander Technique—various things I do with a student bring about a sense of unfamiliarity. Someone might say “this feels weird”. I then ask, “good weird? neutral weird? bad weird?” I’ve yet to have an experience where someone said “bad weird”, it’s always just…not what they’re used to. It’s usually good weird. That’s the constructive space where something new can emerge.

This is something I invite you to practice: can you bring the kind of awareness to your daily life where you can differentiate between just unfamiliar and the actually bad? The first is the path to the freedom to change, the second can cause harm. Language often conflates the two, though, so there’s a process of learning to be able to separate them. Trust your internal sense of what feels bad, but be a little suspicious of your internal sense of what feels right.