What to Tell Your Friend Who Wants to Completely Change Her Life

What 5 of the wisest people have to say about making big decisions

Susie Arnett
5 min readMay 19, 2022
Image credit of the author. Image was created in Canva

Recently a friend told me she was totally changing her life.

She was leaving her long-term relationship, moving out of state and changing her career. All in the next few months! I hadn’t seen her in four months so it was a bit of a shock. While it’s true that she hadn’t been happy, I was at a loss as to how to respond. Should I celebrate with her? Should I encourage caution?

If you’ve faced a similar situation, or are facing one now, here is some wisdom from 5 of the wisest sages of all time that can help you help someone going through major life transitions.

Let’s start with one of the fathers of transitions, William Bridges, the father of “Transitions: Making Sense of One’s Changes.

This classic book is one of the seminal works on the topic. William Bridges writes in his book:

“To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old.”

This was certainly true of my friend and the life changes she was making. But if you dive deeper into Bridges’ work, you’ll see that his definition of transition is something psychological, not situational.

This is not about moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s about a deep inner change.

At the end of the day, if we don’t change what’s on the inside, no amount of changing what’s outside will make a difference. We will always and eventually find ourselves in the same hole.

But how do we change the inside?

Let’s go deeper and dig into some of the most revered spiritual traditions to see what spiritual and psychological teachers had to say to people who wanted to change their lives.

This is what I found.

Buddha

The first person who came to my mind was The Buddha. What would he say to my friend?

According to Buddha:

“All that is born of attachment is suffering.”

Clearly my friend was not suffering from a problem of attachment. She was more than ready to let go of her relationship, career, and home. But, this was obviously not easy.

In fact, letting go of these attachments was causing quite a bit of suffering. When I dug deeper into the Buddha’s words on how to let go, they were simple but not easy.

Buddha wrote:

“The more that we can understand and accept, the less that we fight things, the more happiness we will find — and the less suffering we will endure. Take a breath. And just let go.”

Jesus Christ

Next I reached for the Bible.

As I searched for helpful passages about changing your life or letting go, I found something much more specific that spoke less to the process of change and more to how we can support people going through big life changes.

Here is a wonderful prayer for a friend:

“Dear Lord, I pray for my friend right now. I pray that you will help them with the struggles they are going through in this season. For you know exactly what they need in this moment. Draw near to them and let them feel your presence.

If you’ve ever stood by as a friend shared her upcoming changes, and felt unsure how to help, this can be very useful. This passage offers a way to help when you don’t know how to help. By handing people over to a higher power, we can help without worrying about giving bad advice.

Sigmund Freud

I then looked into the thinking of one of the fathers of psychology, Sigmund Freud. I found two quotes that felt really useful, one about friendship and one about freedom.

He writes:

“Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy.”

This made a lot of sense to me. We often don’t really know what’s best for our friends. We can never really know what someone else is going through or what they should do and the last thing any of us want to do is lead our friends astray or interfere with their process. Giving space and trusting others’ decisions felt like the way to be a good friend.

Freud also wrote:

“People do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility.”

This quote explained to me the fear that can rise up during big transitions.

When we make big changes, we take responsibility for our lives and happiness and that can be scary. It can often feel much easier to keep going on the same path. Taking responsibility also means that there would be nobody else to blame. But taking the freedom to create a life that we love is always worth it.

The Dalai Lama

One of my favorite living spiritual teachers is the Dalai Lama.

I had to look at what advice he had about changing our lives and making big decisions.

I found this quote:

“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.”

This really resonated with me and felt useful for my friend because she had reached a level of irritation inside which demanded that she change the outside. But, do our outside changes lead to inner peace? Or do we need to make peace inside before making outside changes in order to do the right thing?

It is difficult to know for sure but for my friend, she was definitely on the path to finding it out.

Dan Ariely

Finally I looked at the work of Behavior Designer, Dan Ariely. He has spent decades studying human decision making and I decided to conclude with his very useful quote:

“The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.”

Doesn’t that resonate with you and for every one of us making big decisions?

We get so afraid of making a mistake but we can’t beat ourselves up about it nor can we expect to do the right thing every time. Recognizing this makes decisions much easier because it gives us permission to be human.

In Conclusion

After reviewing all this wisdom, I felt more clear and I hope you do too.

The most valuable thing any of us can do is to trust our friends in their process and support them 100%. We can also understand and empathize with what a frightening experience change is because letting go and starting over is scary, which is very natural.

Also, we can support our friends’ inner work to make sure that they really are changing inside, not just on the outside. And if some of these changes end up not being the best, we can be there if they fall.

Turns out these wisdomkeepers had some great advice to help all of us be better friends and to understand the nature of transitions so we can provide useful advice and support.

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Susie Arnett

Transformational Concierge. Wellness-industry leader. Non-stop self-tracker and insanely curious seeker about everything and anything that makes life better.