The people closest to you serve as your anchors. The benefit is that they keep you steady and provide support. The drawback is they also hold you back from making changes that you may want to explore. If they’re not suited in a similar worldview to where you want to go, this force feels practically gravitational; it tethers you to your past self. 

It can also be difficult to pinpoint; it’s often more subtle behaviors that add up to a larger context. The things they say and do suggest that they see you in a way you don’t want to see yourself anymore. Perhaps they ask difficult questions out of concern (but drain you of momentum, e.g., remembering your past missteps), or they challenge your expectations of yourself because they don’t want to see you fail (and they’re possibly relying on you to succeed).

In Working Identity, Professor Herminia Ibarra explains this very thoroughly:

Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments…. Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.

Studies of brainwashing techniques—obviously one of the ultimate forms of identity change—find that standard operating practice is to separate subjects from all those who knew them previously, so as to deprive them of grounding in the old identity. Brainwashing tends to fail when subjects are allowed to return at night to their fellow prisoners (who knew them before) after a day of indoctrination. We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well.

Of course, we don’t need to subject ourselves to brainwashing in order to change careers. But we need to realize that our intimates—spouses, bosses, close friends, parents—expect us to remain the same, and they may pressure us to be consistent. Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, “You’re out of your mind.” Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit “contract.” People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.

Jim Rohn famously summarizes this dynamic, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Arguing about the five is pedantic; the point is, you tend to behave like the people you’re surrounded by. Colin Y.J. Chung has written a post on the topic, “The Universe Hates You,” in which he suggests why the people closest to us respond in ways that prevent us from changing:

You’re rocking their homeostasis. You’re bending (and sometimes breaking) the unspoken rules of your social contract. The “Universe” (your network) doesn’t like it. People get irritated with change. People can’t deal with change. We’re happy in our lukewarm homeostasis bath. We like staying in here.

So this social web, this network, your tribe… the “Universe” is going to test you when you try and shift the power dynamics of your relationship.

It will say to you, “Oh yeah? You think you can just transform and change your daily routines and habits?”

…

You’re deeply embedded in a network of people who need you to be exactly the way you are… or their entire existence, their very survival, is threatened. In some cases, that is literally true. You can’t just abandon your kids in the forest. They’ll die.

But more often than not, a lot of those relationships are not at risk of death. They just feel that way and they’ll fight you tooth and nail to stay the same. They need their daily dosage of “X”. And when they can’t get it…

As you change, people will start testing you to see how serious you are. Colin’s point is to define your new rules and boundaries, and to stick with them:

Reality is defined by the rules we set and enforce… and the rules other people set and enforce on us. When Buddhists say you “make your own reality”… they’re talking about how you set and enforce your rules and boundaries.

People are going to test your rules and boundaries, especially when you change them. Whether you like it or not, people are going to bump up against your boundaries and see if they can bypass your rules.

What I did appreciate about Colin’s article (which you can read in full here) is he doesn’t advocate burning any bridges, cutting people out, or walking away from them. Instead, it’s about renegotiating and making a transition. As Professor Ibarra writes, this can be a way to get closer with the people around you.

This process also involves finding new people to build connections with. When you reach out to new people and shift your connections, you shift the dynamic of your life from being tethered to those around you. Professor Ibarra writes:

Our actions become self-reinforcing: We start to feel more determined to make a change and seek out others who have already done so. Seeing their success makes us doubly determined to make a change, and we take other actions that in turn tip the scales in favor of change.

Professor Ibarra’s suggestion is to activate more dormant ties, “the relationships with people whom you were once close to but now haven’t been in contact with for roughly three years or more…. What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information.”

If you want to activate your dormant ties, you can make a list of the people you haven’t kept in touch with for around three years (former co-workers, peers at school, etc.). Social media, email, photos, calendar events, etc. are all great ways to jog your memory. After you’ve done that, Professor Ibarra writes:

Contact three of them as soon as possible, tell them you are exploring new avenues, and set up a conversation to chat about what they are doing and your career ideas. 

When you meet, ask them who else they think you should contact. If you are a reticent networker (as most of us are), keep going until you have spoken to a minimum of ten people.

Of course, while it’s less comfortable, you can also always cold email people too.

If you feel like you’re bumping up on imaginary barriers, hopefully this provides a helpful starting point for the rules and boundaries you need to set up, the people you need to talk to, and the new people you want to be around in your life.