Our brains, bless them, are wired to notice what's missing
Hi! New here? Welcome to the Uplifters! I'm Aransas Savas. I've spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching. On The Uplifters Podcast, we share diverse stories of women who have found something beautiful on the other side of the hard stuff. Despite self-doubt and fear (and honestly, who doesn't have those?), they've done big, brave things anyway, and show us how we can too!
Seven months ago, we left the city. Good reasons led us here – some things we wanted to move toward, others we were ready to move away from. But last week, on a gray Thursday morning, I could only remember what we'd given up.
The Brooklyn pizza shop where my kids sang to the owner every week as he jacked them up on sweet drinks, then tossed surprise extras into the bag for us to enjoy with our pies. The easy subway ride to meet friends. The feel of sitting at a café on a sunny afternoon in Fort Greene, watching the parade of beautiful people. I was glamorizing what we left behind, conveniently forgetting why we made this choice in the first place.
So I laced up my running shoes and headed out into the drizzle.
The trail along the water was quiet except for the soft patter of rain on leaves. A tiny bunny darted across my path (those ears! that itty bitty tail!!). Sailboats bobbed in the harbor, their masts creating a gentle percussion against the wind. The salt air filled my lungs as I picked up my pace.
Oh right. This is why I'm here.
I see this pattern constantly with the women I coach through career changes. We make brave choices for all the right reasons, then land in our new reality and wonder what the heck we were thinking. The new job isn't exactly what we expected. The entrepreneurial path feels lonelier than we imagined. The corporate exit we planned so carefully leaves us missing the very structure we wanted to escape.
Nothing is ever perfect, not even the changes we desperately wanted to make.
My client Sarah left her VP role at a tech company to start her own consulting practice. Three months in, she was questioning everything. "I miss the team meetings," she told me. "I never thought I'd say that, but I miss having colleagues to bounce ideas off." We spent our session remembering why she'd made the leap – the freedom to choose her clients, the ability to work from her kitchen table while her kids did homework, the chance to build something entirely her own.
The truth about change is that it's freaking messy, even when it's right.
I traded corporate raises and promotions for a different kind of raise altogether. Snack time with my daughters every afternoon after school. The freedom to take a random day off to organize the craft room in my new garage (and yes, I have a garage now and somehow still not enough space for all the paper scraps I can’t let go of!). The ability to do only the work that lights me up, to say yes to conversations that matter and no to everything else.
These raises don't show up in my bank account the same way, but they compound differently. They accumulate in moments of presence, in the space to notice a tiny bunny on a rainy trail run, in the luxury of unhurried time.
But our brains, bless them, are wired to notice what's missing. It's an evolutionary feature, not a bug. We scan for threats, for loss, for what might go wrong. This served us well when we needed to survive, but it makes navigating change feel like we're constantly swimming against the current.
The antidote isn't positive thinking or gratitude lists (though both have their place). It's remembering. Actively, intentionally remembering why we made the choice in the first place.
What if remembering your why became as regular as your morning coffee?
What would it look like to create small rituals that reconnect you to your original intention?
How might you honor both the loss and the gain that come with every brave choice?
For me, it's trail runs in the drizzle and conversations with sailboat captains and the particular way afternoon light hits the water here. It's the realization that I'm still connected to my Brooklyn people – I'm there every week, after all – but now I get to choose when and how.
Change isn't about finding the perfect life. It's about finding the life that aligns with who you're becoming, even when that person is still figuring herself out.
Your next brave step might feel unclear right now, especially if you're in the messy middle of a big change. That's exactly where courage lives – not in the clarity, but in the willingness to keep moving forward while you remember why you started.
XO,
Aransas
P.S. If you're navigating your own messy middle of change, I'd love to explore it with you.
Catch Deesha Philyaw's story here for living proof that we can rewrite our expectations.
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