How can you tell me you’re a Millennial without telling me you’re a Millennial?
You can’t say (or even think) the word “pivot” without your brain screaming it in Ross Gellar’s voice.
It’s an iconic Friends scene: the crew is trying to move a large sofa up a narrow flight of stairs, when – ever the bossy-big-brother-type – Ross tries leading the couch around a turn by yelling for everyone to PIVOOOOTT!! It’s funny because it’s so relatable, but it’s not just the frustration of moving furniture or rolling your eyes at a control-freak with questionable idea-sketching skills. We all know the experience of going in a direction that you think is going to work, then suddenly you hit a wall (or railing or friend’s face or whatever other obstacle) and you have to figure out how to change direction without losing sight of your goal. It’s hard enough to do this for ourselves, but when we have other people we are working with or responsible for, the dynamic becomes much more complicated and stress-inducing.
Sometimes life calls for a pivot: circumstances change, unforeseen obstacles materialize, or the plan we had laid out turns out to be not to scale, so to speak.
What seemed like it would work in your head doesn’t actually play out that way in real life, and you have to figure out what to do next. Do you try to muscle through – drywall be damned! – even if it leaves a bit of destruction in your wake? Or do you keep turning the couch different ways until you find just the right geometry, an often tedious and exhausting process? Ideally you wouldn’t have to saw the couch in half to extricate it from the stairwell, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.
They say parenthood changes everything, and it does in the sense that everything we do now affects someone else, so our perspective shifts.
With kids as our focus, we run every decision through any number of possible scenarios to choose the best path for them as well as us, and often, that can mean adjusting to changes is especially difficult and distressing. We can be tempted to power through the original plan we laid out so nice and neat, but we may do damage by knocking holes in the walls as we go, and we’ll have to go back and patch things up later. We can pivot this way, pivot back another way, and PIVAAAATT again and again until we get pinned against a wall and just want to give up. Sometimes we say, you know what, this really just isn’t working, and I need to get a different couch, make a different plan, move to a different building with wider staircases, or maybe find a ground-level condo, but I just need to scrap that plan and start thinking afresh. Keeping your goal in sight doesn’t always mean doing things exactly the way you planned it the first time. Sometimes it just means staying on your feet, pressing through, and living to try again.
A few months ago, I made the decision to start a full-time job after 13+ years as a stay-at-home mom.
My plan for this job would allow me to finish grad school, save more for retirement as well as vacations, achieve some personal goals, not to mention it would set a great example for my kids. However, over the next few weeks, as I was preparing to start my new job, the wheels started to fall off the bus. My grad school plans fell through, the financial situation wasn’t what I expected, and our family experienced a crisis; everything changed. At first, I tried to muscle through with the plan, because it was such a great plan – I even drew a sketch! But it didn’t take long for me to realize this simply wasn’t working. I loved my job and the people I worked with, but circumstances changed, and I needed to pivot. Actually, the analogy may even fit that I had to cut this sucker in half to try another time, another route, maybe another couch altogether, because I resigned from my position less than a month in.
In a lot of ways, that feels like a failure. It feels like trading my dream couch in for $4 store credit (listen, if you hate this extended metaphor because you don’t like Friends, you just need to stop being a grouch and go enjoy Friends already). It definitely feels like letting down my coworkers, my team, my students, and even my family. Just because I know it’s the right decision doesn’t make it an easy one. But I realized all of my own assurances weren’t enough for me to go through with it; I was waiting on someone to give me permission to pivot.
If you find yourself stuck and you know you need to change course, please allow me to give you that permission to trust your gut and do what it takes to get back on track, even if that means jumping off the tracks for a minute. Stepping back doesn’t make you a failure, and letting go doesn’t make you a coward. You were brave to try, and you are wise to learn. Sometimes life throws you curveballs, and what defines your character is not whether or not you hit a home run; it’s your decision to keep swinging, even if you strike out. If you need permission to pivot today, here it is. You’re going to be just fine.
