Last weekend, I caught up with my dear friend Rod, whom I met while living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He’s a polar plunger, and I love hearing about his process.

Rod has one of the most balanced minds I’ve encountered, and he exemplifies my new understanding of moderation. I find myself hanging on to his every word when it comes to the advice he offers and the way he navigates change and evolution in his life. He and I are so kindred.

There are two types of polar plungers: those who acclimate slowly and those who dive in.

Rod chooses the ‘dive in’ method for his plunges in Lake Superior. While visiting Crater Lake during my visit to Oregon, I also chose the ‘dive in’ approach in those 59-degree waters.

From my perspective, the benefit of this approach is that any discomfort associated with the experience is localized to the ‘after’ segment of time. It’s a few seconds of adjustment but the state of shock sort of helps a gal not feel it much, my experience taught me. 😉

On the other hand, if I had acclimated slowly, it would have been brutal, I imagined. I would have been tortured by wanting to get in that water so badly, but enduring emotional toil with every passing minute until I went under. That kind of discomfort was not my preference.

Whenever we make a choice, we’re really selecting which set of pros and cons we can most easily live with.

But it’s of vital importance to make our choices based on more than just the pros and cons of each. We need to consider our relationship to and with elements of the peripheral environment.

When I chose the dive-in method, I didn’t want to feel the discomfort slowly and drawn out. But but but but – this is a big butt – I could be bold in choosing this method because I’m very comfortable in an environment of water and my ability to swim. I also feel very tuned to knowing my body’s capabilities and trust my relationship with it in those conditions.

On the contrary, put me on a hike with a teeny tiny decline of six inches or more, and I will freeze. I have a massive fear of falling for some reason and while going up doesn’t scare me, coming down is a different story. I’ll inch my way down with a sideways baby step one after another, dragging out what could have been a single step if I weren’t afraid. If the situation is serious enough (10 inches of decline feels like a mountain to me), I will just get on my bum and slide down.

None of it makes logical sense. But logic – where fear is present – is always overruled. I’m an acclimating slowly girl in hiking down conditions presently. Knowing this makes it possible for me to work on this fear little by little by putting in the reps and building a memory of success to support confidence and trust in my body in that environment.

Chosen change can be disastrous if, in addition to selecting the set of pros and cons we can most likely live with, we aren’t also considering our current relationship to self in that environment. This is a massively overlooked part of creating sweeping changes and why many go wrong. The unfortunate byproduct of a “failed” attempt at change is that we lose trust in ourselves and are even less likely to take a chance and be bold moving further along.

We lose trust in ourselves not because we “failed” but because we didn’t effectively relate to ourselves in making that choice. There’s freedom in understanding this distinction because all of the responsibility is within, and when it comes to stuff within, we have all the power in the world to affect change.

This is good news.