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Change stinks. I don't like it. Comment say boo.
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Chasing the Awesome Life podcast. I'm your host, Nick DiStefano. It is Monday morning. I'm recording this episode from my phone here in my house with my kids around because that's my life right now. We are working from daycare and we are embracing the suck. And that's what this episode is all about. Embracing the suck specifically of change. There is a lot of change going on in the world right now. There is a lot of
of uncertainty. There is a lot of crap happening to all of us. I work at a university where 100 people were just let go last Thursday and
before the 4th of July. And I think it was, while it was known that it was coming, it was still unsettling. It was uncomfortable. It was disappointing. People are angry and sad, and there are lots of emotions. And I think that happens whenever change occurs in our lives, wherever that may be. We don't like change. People don't
are not comfortable when it comes to change. If I asked you to simply just cross your arms, you would cross them in the most comfortable way possible, the way that you naturally do it. And then if I said to change them and to instead of putting your left on the top, put your right on the top of your two arms, you would probably think that's uncomfortable. It's unnatural. I don't like it. We do not enjoy as humans when things change. That's okay.
But it's also something that we need to work through. Embracing the suck is a verb. We are embracing it. We're learning to use it. We're learning to move through adversity and with adversity and not against adversity. And I kind of want to tell everyone a quick story this morning.
about a change that I experienced in my life, both Megan and I did, and then also introduce you to the emotional cycle of change, something that if you get a little more comfortable with, if you become more knowledgeable of, and you can become aware of where you sit within the emotional cycle of change, then you can move through it faster and you can embrace the suck of it a little better. So,
Let me tell you a quick story. So you hear the kids in the background, obviously. You can hear them... Excuse me. You can hear them jumping around and screaming. They're watching some Paw Patrol right now. The pups are about to save a dragon, all right? In case you were wondering. So my son Calvin, he's five years old, is on the autism spectrum. And I can tell you that about three years ago, I was not comfortable even saying that, telling anyone, or even admitting it myself. So...
When he was about two and a half, two years old, right when our son Cooper, who is two years old, was born, we started noticing some speech delays within Calvin and some things that we thought, this doesn't seem on par or level with the rest of the other kids in his class. And I usually do not like to say the word normal. I don't think anybody is normal. There is no normal in this world to me. So...
And we noticed that he was to some degree falling behind some of the other kids in his, you know, his daycare. And we started to go through this process of getting him some help in terms of speech delays and developments, never thinking anything else of it.
Ultimately, through that process, through the county where we live and through lots of different doctor's visits and assessments and tests and questionnaires and a million and one things, we ultimately received a medical diagnosis in October of 2017.
that Calvin was excuse me of 2018 goodness Cooper was born he was uh Cooper was about six months old 2018 October we received the diagnosis that Calvin was on the autism spectrum so for those of you unfamiliar with the autism spectrum it's ASD we would like to call it the autism spectrum disorder that's what Calvin was diagnosed with um
What that means is Calvin at times struggles with some communication. He struggles with understanding things like abstract concepts. He really likes things that are particular or in order. He loves numbers. The kid's obsessed with numbers and the alphabet. And there's just many different communication aspects to autism.
And I will get into more details in terms of what I do with autism now in future podcasts. But I want to focus on embracing the suck relating to change. And I want to give you an analogy real quick that I was shared. This was shared with me not too long ago about what it's like to find out your kid has autism. So.
When you have a kid, and you'll hear him in the background screaming, when you have a kid, it's often like they say, planning to go on a honeymoon to Italy. When you are preparing for that honeymoon, when you're preparing for that large trip to go to Italy for a week, you know what to expect. You are excited. You are excited.
we're gonna have to stop because the two of them are fighting we're gonna come back to this analogy in just a second this is real y'all we're gonna edit this piece out we're not gonna edit we're gonna leave it in there i'm gonna make sure no no kids are hurt and we'll come back in pause okay and we are back sorry folks we have kids fighting over toys in my house uh about every two minutes so you're gonna get about two minutes worth of podcasts and then a
A large fight and then two more minutes. So let's get back to the analogy of what it's like when you find out your kid has autism. So you're planning to go to Italy. You know what to expect. You're excited for certain trips and excursions and you're planning to go to Rome and then you're going to go to...
Milan, and you have all these things planned, you're excited for it, right? That's what it's like when you are preparing for having a child. You paint a room a certain way, you expect specific things. You know, we painted baseball leather stitching on Calvin's wall because I was excited for him to grow up and love baseball like I do. And when we got off the plane in Italy,
We weren't in Italy. We were actually in Hungary. Okay, so imagine you're planning and preparing for certain things and you have expectations in your head. You think you're going to be in Italy and then you get off the plane and you're in Hungary and you think, what the, where am I? Why are we here? What is this place? What's going on?
I don't get it. I don't like it. I wasn't prepared for this. No one told me it was going to look like this. I don't have the right maps. I don't have any of the things that I need to be successful. How am I supposed to adjust to this? I'm not ready for this. All those things go through your head. And it's the same way for us when we found out Calvin had autism.
There was this moment of like, holy crap, this is like we didn't even want to admit it. And we fought against it. And we tried to, you know, find reasons why why it happened and what was the cause of it. And, you know, there really is no point in doing that.
We need to embrace the fact that our son is our son. And as we always say, Calvin is Calvin. That's why I dislike the word normal because there is no normal to me. Calvin is just who he is. And he has things that make him special. He has things that he struggles with. And that's the same thing for all of us. But...
The reason we were able to get through and the reason we are where we are today related to Calvin and autism and that change for us, you know, getting off the plane in Hungary and not Italy like we had expected with a neurotypical child is we have moved through what we call the emotional cycle of change and we've moved through it quickly. Right. I mean, and I say quickly because
in relative terms. This is all in comparison to all sorts of different... Hi, buddy. How are you? Oh, thanks. You're going to give me a hug. You're so nice. You want me to come sit down with you? All right, we can do that. So this emotional cycle of change, right? There's four phases to it, and we're going to cover them over the next several episodes. I'm going to talk about the emotional cycle of change.
and how we can move through it and embrace change and suck a little bit more. So the first part of it is what we call uninformed optimism. And that's where we were before we ever knew Calvin had autism. We just thought, oh, you know, he's just behind. Everything's okay. We're talking to be good, right? That's that.
state before something actually happens where the rug is ripped out from underneath of you, or maybe you know it's coming and you're still thinking like, it's going to be okay. I'm not going to lose my job. I'm not going to be one of the people. That's okay. That's uninformed optimism. That's where a lot of people sit. Then the thing happens and we start moving into more of an informed pessimism and you have the information. We knew Calvin had autism. We recognized it and we
we started to feel bad about it. And then here's the thing, right? Before we can go out of that informed pessimism where we think negatively, we move into what they call the valley of despair. You heard me say that correctly, right? The valley of despair is a real thing. And it's this place of just...
negativity and doubt and fear and uncertainty and all these awful emotions that we have as humans when we don't like something or we're uncomfortable with something or we don't want to accept something. And if you think about any time you've experienced change in your life, that has probably been a place where you have been. You have to go through the valley of despair before you can move up into what we call informed optimism and ultimately success and fulfillment.
right? Those five stages have to be worked through individually. They have to be worked through as an organization. They have to be gone through. You have to go through all of them. I'm not saying that the valley of despair is something you're going to be in for days or months or weeks. It could be moments depending on what the changes you're going in and through in your life. But
It is something that we all go through. Okay. You have to go through all five of those stages if you're going to embrace change.
So what I'm going to do for people here on this podcast is I'm going to go through those five stages and talk about ways you can go through them. So our next episode will be specifically talking about moving from informed optimism to informed pessimism. Okay. How do we move through those two stages? How we can do it faster. Okay.
I need you all to know all this information comes from Don Kelly and Daryl Connor. They actually published in 1979 in a psychology journal this information about the psychology of the emotional cycle of change. So that's where this information comes from.
I will tell you more of my own stories as I have moved through this cycle of change and hope that if you are going through uncertainty and change, you can then also figure out where you are in this cycle and how you can move to the next step and ultimately through to success and fulfillment. So with all of the change going on in this world, I hope that this will be valuable for you. Again, this is just part one of this series on embracing the suck of change.
Y'all have an awesome day. Keep chasing.