Thrive Wave Coaching

The email landed on a Tuesday afternoon. Restaurant operations were shutting down. Layoffs would follow.

I had expected it. We all had. Covid was tearing through the industry and every day brought news of another venue closing its doors. But expecting something and actually experiencing it are two different things.

The shock hit first. That hollow, slightly surreal feeling of reading words you understand individually but cannot quite process as a sentence. Then came the scramble. My brain went straight to worst-case scenarios. What if I am laid off and cannot find work? How will I pay the bills? How will I provide for my family? How will we survive?

I played out every terrible version of the future I could think of. All of them felt real. None of them were helpful.

Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do

If you have ever been through a restructure, a sudden team change, a new manager who rewrites the rules overnight, or a role shift that nobody asked your opinion about, you know exactly what this feels like. The ground moves. And your brain does what brains do when the ground moves.

It panics.

This is not weakness. It is biology.

Your brain has a negativity bias. It is wired to scan for threats, not opportunities. So when change arrives uninvited, your mind does not calmly weigh up the pros and cons. It runs a horror film of everything that could go wrong.

You might try to reason your way out of it. Tell yourself it will be fine. That every change brings opportunity. You might even believe it intellectually. But the feeling does not shift. There is a gap between what you know logically and what you feel in your body.

No amount of rational thinking closes that gap on its own.

Why imposed change hits harder than you expect

Psychology has a name for why this hits so hard. Self-determination theory describes three needs at the foundation of how we function: autonomy (the need to feel like you are steering your own life), competence (the need to feel capable and effective) and relatedness (the need to feel connected to the people around you).

When change is imposed on you, all three take a hit at once. You did not choose this. You do not yet know how to operate in the new reality. And the people, routines and team dynamics you relied on may have just shifted or disappeared entirely.

That is why it feels like more than just “a change.” It is not one thing you lost. It is three.

The corporate response makes it worse

Here is where most workplaces get it exactly wrong.

The unwritten rule in corporate culture is: be professional. Stay composed. Do not let them see you struggle. Business must go on.

So you swallow it. You nod in the meeting. You update your LinkedIn. You say “I am excited about the new direction” while your stomach is doing something entirely different.

But change triggers something closer to a grief process than a strategic challenge. There are stages. Shock. Denial. Frustration. Resistance. And eventually, if you let yourself get there, acceptance and redirection.

Every one of those stages carries information you need.

When you skip them because professionalism demands it, you do not become more resilient. You become stuck. The emotions do not disappear because you ignored them. They just go underground, showing up as low energy, cynicism, quiet disengagement or that constant, low-grade anxiety you cannot quite name.

The people who move through change well are not the ones who skip the emotional part. They are the ones who make space for it.

Feel it before you fix it

This does not mean falling apart. It means being honest with yourself about what you are experiencing. Naming it. Sitting with the discomfort instead of immediately reaching for a plan or a positive spin.

When the restaurant shut down, I did not jump straight into problem-solving mode. I sat with the shock for a while. I let the worst-case scenarios run their course without trying to argue with them. And something interesting happened.

Once I stopped fighting the feelings, they started to lose their grip.

The questions shift when you stop fighting

After the initial wave passed, I noticed my thinking changed. Not because I forced it, but because I had given it room to move.

Instead of “What if everything falls apart?” I started asking different questions. What would be the best possible outcome here? What else could I be doing? Is there something I have been wanting to pursue but kept pushing aside?

This is the shift from threat mode to possibility. It does not happen by telling yourself to think positively. It happens when the emotional charge has been processed enough that your brain can finally see past the danger.

And those questions led me somewhere unexpected. For years, I had been playing with the idea of studying. Of pursuing a completely different career. But there was never enough time. Too much stress. Too many responsibilities. A whole catalogue of very reasonable excuses.

Now every single one of those excuses had dropped away.

For the first time, I had space to actually explore. If I allowed myself to.

Take one step back into the driver’s seat

This is where autonomy starts to come back.

When change is imposed, everything feels like it is happening to you. The antidote is not to control the change itself. You cannot. But you can find one thing within this new situation that you choose, learn or act on.

What could you learn right now that would make you feel more prepared for what is coming? What is one small step you could take today? Not to fix everything. Just to remind yourself that you still have agency in this.

For me, it was researching study programmes. I did not commit to anything. I just looked. That small action shifted something. It moved me from “this is happening to me” to “here is what I am choosing to do about it.”

That is what one small action can do. It gives you back a sense of competence, because you are learning and preparing. It gives you back a sense of autonomy, because you are making a choice instead of just reacting. It does not fix the situation. But it reminds you that you are not powerless in it.

One step. That is where it starts.

What looks like the end is rarely the end

Months later, I could see it clearly. That moment of crisis was not the end of the road.

It was a pit stop.

The career I had been curious about for years? I would never have pursued it if Covid had not forced a pause. The change I had been dreading was clearing the path to something I actually wanted. I just could not see it while my brain was busy screening worst-case scenarios.

This does not mean every imposed change leads to something better. But it does mean that the story your brain writes in the first 48 hours is almost never the full story.

You will not know what is on the other side until you let yourself move through the process instead of trying to skip it.

What are you resisting right now?

You might be in the middle of a change you did not ask for. A restructure. A new strategy. A role that no longer fits who you are becoming.

And you might be doing what most professionals do. Holding it together. Performing stability. Waiting for the discomfort to pass on its own.

What if it will not pass until you stop bypassing it?

What if the thing you need most right now is not a better strategy for managing change, but the permission to stop managing it for a moment and actually feel what is there?

And what if, underneath all that resistance, there is something you have been wanting to do for a long time?

👉 If you are ready to stop performing through change and start designing what comes next, let’s talk.

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