Big Girl Panties Diaries - Entry #176: 365 Reminders. Apparently, I Need Every Single One.

What writing The Panty Stack is teaching me about change, emotions, and the inconvenient truth that knowing better doesn't always mean doing better.

There's a special kind of irony in writing 365 reminders about navigating life, change, relationships, and everything in between, only to realize that the person who might need those reminders most is the one writing them.

That would be me.

I've spent more than 25 years helping organizations navigate change. I wrote an entire book about the human side of transformation. I speak about emotional intelligence, uncertainty, and why people don't always behave the way logic suggests they should.

And yet, here I am, editing my next book, The Panty Stack: 365 Things We Know, Forget & Learn Again, and realizing that apparently, I need to take my own advice.

Well, this is awkward.

Two Books. Same Humans. Different Chaos.

For years, I've been writing Big Girl Panties Diaries (BGPD), sharing stories about careers, relationships, parenting, leadership, reinvention, disappointment, and the occasional spectacularly questionable decision. Some were funny. Others were painful. A few were probably cheaper than therapy, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as a financial strategy.

Almost every article ended with a lesson, something I wanted to remember the next time life decided to test whether I'd actually learned anything. Those became my BGPD Rules.

As I started revisiting years of writing, I noticed something. The same lessons kept showing up in different situations. Different people, different circumstances, same underlying human nonsense.

Apparently, I'd been building another stack all along.

My first book, The People Stack: Why Change Fails (and What Actually Fixes It), grew out of years of watching organizations spend extraordinary amounts of money on transformation while somehow forgetting to account for the people expected to make it happen.

We develop strategies. We implement technology. We redesign processes. We hire consultants. We create beautiful PowerPoint presentations with enough arrows, circles, and corporate buzzwords to make a bingo card burst into flames.

Then we announce the change, explain why it's brilliant, and wonder why everyone isn't immediately thrilled.

Spoiler alert: The humans have questions.

The People Stack explores five conditions people need to navigate organizational change successfully: Clarity, Alignment, Capability, Belief, and Sustainment, all resting on a foundation of Trust.

But here's what I've come to appreciate even more while writing The Panty Stack. Those same humans go home at night.

And wouldn't you know it, they're still human.

The uncertainty someone feels during a corporate restructuring isn't entirely different from what they experience when a relationship changes. The fear of losing a professional identity isn't so different from the grief that comes when a personal chapter ends. And that desperate desire for clarity, certainty, and control doesn't magically disappear when we close our laptops.

Where The People Stack explores what people need from organizations during change, The Panty Stack explores what we need from ourselves when life decides to rearrange the furniture without asking permission.

It's built around six themes: Calmfidence, Change & Uncertainty, Relationships & Boundaries, Emotional Resilience, Career, Identity & Reinvention, and Leadership & the Human Side.

It's not a 365-day self-improvement program promising that you'll emerge as a fully enlightened human with perfect boundaries, flawless emotional regulation, and an alphabetized spice rack.

Please. I have enough pressure.

It's 365 things we know, forget, and learn again.

And one particular lesson keeps following me around.

Change is emotional before it's logical.

You Can't Spreadsheet Your Way Out of a Feeling

I'm a problem solver. Give me a complicated transformation, competing priorities, unclear expectations, and a few people who aren't speaking to each other, and I'm generally pretty comfortable figuring out how to move things forward.

It's what I do.

Unfortunately, I sometimes approach my personal life with the same enthusiasm for root-cause analysis.

Something happens that disappoints me, frustrates me, scares me, or hurts me, and my brain immediately opens a new investigation. What happened? Why did it happen? What did they mean? Did I miss something? Should I say something? What are the possible scenarios? Can we get a timeline? Perhaps a decision tree?

Before long, I've mentally conducted six stakeholder interviews, developed three competing hypotheses, and scheduled an imaginary steering committee meeting.

All before breakfast.

Because surely, if I can understand the problem, I can solve it.

Except here's the rather inconvenient truth. Understanding why something happened isn't the same as processing how it made us feel.

We can understand why someone made a decision and still feel hurt by it. We can recognize that a relationship has changed and still grieve what it used to be. We can know that something is outside our control and still desperately want to control it.

Logic doesn't cancel emotion.

Sometimes our frantic attempts to figure everything out are simply a more socially acceptable way of avoiding what we're feeling.

Which is particularly annoying when you make a living teaching people about the human side of change.

Organizations Aren't Any Better at This

I've watched this dynamic play out in organizations more times than I can count.

Leadership spends months working through a major transformation. They've examined the business case, considered alternatives, debated risks, and eventually reached a decision. By the time they're ready to announce it, they're already emotionally and intellectually several miles down the road.

Employees, meanwhile, are hearing about it for the first time.

Leadership proudly presents the strategy, financial benefits, implementation timeline, and future-state operating model.

Employees are thinking, "Am I going to lose my job? Will I know how to do this? Who am I supposed to trust? And why does everyone on that stage look so excited?"

Leadership is speaking logic. Employees are experiencing emotion.

Then, when people don't immediately embrace the plan, someone inevitably says the magic word.

Resistance.

Ah, yes. Resistance. That convenient little label we slap on people when their emotional processing doesn't fit our implementation schedule.

Here's what I've spent years trying to help leaders understand: resistance is often self-protection. When people feel their competence, certainty, or control is threatened, their behavior reflects that. They're not necessarily being difficult. They're trying to figure out whether they're going to be okay.

And no, another 47-slide PowerPoint probably isn't going to resolve that feeling.

We need to acknowledge the emotional experience before we can expect people to engage with the logical solution.

Here's the kicker. We need to do the same thing for ourselves.

The Thing Behind the Thing

One of the entries in The Panty Stack is called The Last Straw Is Rarely Just About the Last Straw.

Because it isn't.

Sometimes it's the unanswered text. The offhand comment. The email that arrives at exactly the wrong moment. The person who asks one perfectly reasonable question when you've already answered 73 unreasonable ones.

And suddenly, you're considering moving to a cabin in the woods where nobody knows your name and the Wi-Fi is intentionally terrible.

But the last straw isn't usually the problem. It's just the thing that finally lands on top of everything else we've been carrying.

The same happens during organizational change. That employee who seems disproportionately upset about a new process may be reacting to years of change fatigue, broken promises, unclear expectations, or a growing fear that they can't keep up.

If we focus only on the behavior, we miss the emotion underneath it.

And if we do that in our own lives, we miss it there, too.

I've been trying to get better at asking myself what is really happening beneath my reaction. Am I angry, or am I hurt? Am I frustrated, or am I afraid? Am I trying to solve something because there's actually a problem, or because I don't particularly enjoy sitting with uncertainty?

Sometimes the answer isn't flattering. Sometimes I discover that I'm not nearly as evolved as I'd like to believe.

And sometimes I just need to acknowledge that something hurt my feelings.

There. I said it.

No strategic assessment required.

Feel First. Solve Second.

This may be the most important reminder I've taken away from editing The Panty Stack.

Not every uncomfortable emotion is a five-alarm fire requiring an immediate response, a difficult conversation, or a detailed action plan.

Sometimes it's just an emotion.

And emotions, inconvenient little creatures that they are, generally don't disappear because we've decided they're inefficient.

I've been trying to practice something that sounds ridiculously simple but is surprisingly difficult for a lifelong problem solver: acknowledge the feeling before trying to fix the situation.

That means naming what I'm actually experiencing rather than immediately focusing on what someone else did. It means giving myself permission to feel disappointed, hurt, frustrated, or afraid without building an entire legal defense for why the emotion is justified.

It also means separating what I know from what I've decided must be true.

Because our brains can be incredibly talented fiction writers when information is missing. One unanswered message and suddenly we're producing a six-part psychological thriller starring ourselves as the problem.

Sometimes we need more information. Sometimes we need to have a conversation. Sometimes we need to establish a boundary. And sometimes we need to accept that we aren't going to get the explanation, apology, or outcome we'd prefer.

But we don't necessarily need to decide any of that while we're still emotionally activated.

The same principle applies when we're leading change. We need to listen before we prescribe, get curious before we label, and understand what people are experiencing before we decide how to move them forward.

Apparently, what works in the boardroom also works in the kitchen when you're standing there overthinking something while pretending to look for a snack.

Who knew?

Knowing Better Doesn't Mean We Always Do Better

Here's what has been both funny and mildly insulting about editing The Panty Stack.

I keep finding things I've written that I genuinely believe.

Trust your gut. Ask for what you need. Stop making assumptions about other people's intentions. Let go of what you can't control. Don't confuse being needed with being valued. Recognize when you're creating a story instead of dealing with facts.

Excellent advice, Julie.

Five stars.

Would recommend.

And yet, there I am, occasionally doing the exact opposite.

I can explain the emotional journey of change to a room full of executives, but that doesn't mean I'm immune to it myself. I can help a leader recognize that someone's behavior is rooted in uncertainty while simultaneously overanalyzing someone else's behavior in my own life.

I can encourage people to embrace Calmfidence, that blend of calm and confidence that allows us to move forward without having all the answers, and still find myself wishing someone would hand me a neatly packaged explanation with a guaranteed outcome.

Apparently, knowing the framework doesn't mean we get to skip the experience.

And perhaps that's the whole point.

Growth isn't about becoming someone who never struggles with the same lesson twice. It's about recognizing the pattern a little sooner, responding with a little more perspective, and remembering that we're allowed to be human while we're figuring things out.

Which is exactly why The Panty Stack isn't called 365 Things I Have Completely Mastered and Will Never Screw Up Again.

That would be a very short book.

Possibly a pamphlet.

Maybe We Need to Stop Fixing Everything

The more I work on The Panty Stack, the more convinced I become that the line between organizational change and personal change is much thinner than we pretend.

In both cases, we want clarity. We want certainty. We want control. We want to know that we'll be okay. And when those things feel threatened, our emotions tend to arrive long before our rational thinking has finished putting on its shoes.

That's not a character flaw. It's part of being human.

The problem comes when we ignore the emotion and race straight to the solution.

Organizations do it with strategies, communications plans, and training programs. We do it personally with overthinking, overexplaining, and occasionally trying to manage situations that were never ours to control.

Neither approach works particularly well when we skip the human part.

So here's what I'm reminding myself as I work through 365 lessons I apparently needed to relearn.

I don't have to figure everything out immediately. I don't have to turn every disappointment into a problem-solving exercise. I don't have to understand every person's behavior to decide how I want to respond. And I certainly don't have to pretend something doesn't hurt simply because I understand it intellectually.

Sometimes I need to feel the feeling, get curious about what's underneath it, and give myself a little time before deciding what comes next.

You'd think after 25 years of helping other people navigate change, this would be second nature.

Apparently not.

But at least I had the good sense to write it down.

Now I just need to remember to read it.

BGPD Rule: Change is emotional before it's logical. Feel first. Solve second. And remember, knowing better doesn't mean we always do better.

Big girl panties on. Feelings included.