There’s a moment nobody really prepares you for.
The disruption itself lands hard enough. Then comes the moment after, when the noise fades and you find yourself at the low point. Uncomfortable. Unsettled. Caught between the life you knew and a future that hasn’t taken shape yet.
And everything in you wants out of it. Fast.
This is the change point. It’s one every human being hits at some stage, yet almost nobody is taught how to navigate it.
When the familiar track shifts
Life moves along a familiar track. Your routines, your sense of who you are, the way you see the world, all of it running quietly in the background, like a programme you’ve long stopped noticing. And then something shifts. A relationship ends. A role disappears. A chapter closes without warning.
The world that made sense a moment ago suddenly doesn’t quite fit anymore.
The three stages of change
The Universal Model of Change maps exactly this journey. It tells us that change, whether we choose it or it chooses us, always moves through the same arc:
- an ending
- a low point
- the possibility of a new beginning
Knowing you’re in the model won’t make the low point comfortable. It does make it navigable. It reminds you that what you’re feeling is a process, and processes have a way through.
Two directions at the low point
At the low point, two directions open up.
One pulls you back toward the familiar. Back to the patterns, the habits, the version of yourself you know best. This pull is powerful and completely natural. The brain is wired to seek out what it already knows. It’s efficient. It feels like safety. And it will make a very convincing case for why going back is the sensible thing to do.
Here’s the thing: that familiar place has already changed. The experience that brought you to the low point has shifted something, in your circumstances and inside of you. You can reach back toward it, and you’ll land somewhere slightly different, because you are no longer exactly the same person.
The other direction may seem harder. It asks you to move forward into something not yet fully formed. To let the low point become the beginning of a new chapter, one where your understanding of yourself and the world gets a little bigger, and a little richer, than it was before.
What NLP teaches us about the low point
This is at the heart of what NLP teaches us about change.
The low point is a signal that your old way of seeing things is being asked to expand. The discomfort you feel there is growth asking permission to begin.
The low point is uncomfortable by design. It was always meant to be moved through.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: if this low point is the beginning of something, what might that something be?
One question to ask yourself this week:
What would I do next if I knew I could never go back?
Is it time to move forward and expand into a new way of being and a new way of seeing your world? Check out our schedule of events here.
