Changing Roles With Grace And Ease How To Master Daily Transitions

How many different roles do you play each day? Chances are the list is long: employee, manager, colleague, homemaker, spouse, parent, child, friend, customer, and more. Each role requires something different from you, and if youre not conscious of making the change, and making sure youre being appropriate to whats called for from you in each role, there can be consequences. Even just switching from one to the other can be jarring and stressful.

How can you reduce the impact of all the role switching, reduce the stress, and increase your comfort and ease? Here are three powerful strategies to ensure your success:

1) Be Deliberate About What You Want to Create As You Switch Roles

Before you enter each new role, you have the opportunity to choose how you want things to go, and mentally and emotionally align yourself with your positive choice. To do this, you will want to leverage your powers of imagination and visualization to mentally rehearse the coming scene. Imagine its a movie, and youre creating it. Play it out in your mind before you play it out in time and space. Because the subconscious mind doesn't distinguish between what's "really happening" and what you imagine, mental rehearsal is incredibly powerful. It was originally discovered as a key for training astronauts, and is now used by all elite athletes, and many top performers in every field.

In the case of transitioning between roles, you can literally program yourself for success by taking a few moments before you engage in your next role, to pause and imagine how you want things to go. For instance, if you're coming home from "work" and transitioning to the role of parent or spouse, imagine walking through the door. How do you want to greet the people inside? What feeling tone do you want to create? What would make the time with them special, easy, uplifting? Watch the movie unfold, and feel the good feelings you would feel. Play this out, and you'll be amazed how things go when you "actually" walk in the door.

2) Choose Your Mood

Another key is to shift your state, or mood, before you head into the next role. Some quick and simple techniques for this include:

- get a little exercise;

- listen or dance to an uplifting piece of music;

- sing a song;

- meditate;

- write or say out loud 5 or more things you are grateful for;

- write or say out loud 5 or more successes, wins you've had that day;

- take a moment to focus on what you love or appreciate or wins you have had in the role you are about to enter.

Any one or more of these will alter your mood, and allow you to enter into your next role more balanced, centered and grounded.

3) Put Down What You Were Doing

It's important when shifting gears between different roles to let go of where you just were, and what you were doing. The worst part of having multiple roles is carrying them all with you all of the time. It quickly becomes quite a load!

Despite all the talk about multitasking, the truth is you do best when you focus on where you are and what youre doing RIGHT NOW. To help release the feeling that you need to hang on, remember, or keep track of things, I recommend a process I call bookmarking. Create a bookmark for yourself, so you are able to easily put down your role, and pick it up again when its time to return to it.

You can create a bookmark by writing yourself a note about what you were doing, what worked and what didn't work, what you'd like to remember and where you'll want to pick up when you re-enter that role. You can also do this with a voice recorder. If youve got a car ride between roles, for example, use that time to record a message to yourself acknowledging what you accomplished, whats next, and all the things you want to make sure you remember. Speaking or writing all this helps you let go and put it aside until its time to deal with it again. Then when youre headed back to this role, job, etc., listen to your recording and you'll be ready to go.

Whatever strategies you choose, the key is to be deliberate about shifting from one role to the next. Bringing the agenda, stress, assumptions and ways of being from the previous role into the next situation is a recipe for trouble. Be conscious and take steps to ensure that you are present and available to be appropriate to the upcoming role each time you transition, and youll be amazed how much more grounded, peaceful, and effective you will be.