Sunday coffee is Tuesday after dinner this week! I booked a last minute ticket to be with my family this last weekend. It was not what I expected. Arriving home to Florida felt like I was a stranger in my own home. Everything looks different to me after just 3 months. I wanted to be sliding back into something familiar and what I have been missing so much. The old urges crept in — the urge to “mother,” to insert myself, to control the flow so I could feel part of it. Almost instantly, my family’s mirror came back: “Whoa, what’s with you?”

It wasn’t criticism. It was recognition that I hadn’t been there in three weeks and they had flowed into a new pattern. I was trying to insert the old me — the one who played a certain role, kept things on track, orchestrated the details — but they had already found a rhythm without that role. And that’s when the whisper of the old me showed up: you’re not needed here anymore…you don’t fit in. That whisper made the push to go back to the old way even more intense, and I had to really be aware of what I wanted in that moment.

And just like that, I saw how quickly I could revert back to an earlier version of myself. The me I’ve been practicing in Texas — slowing down, observing, letting go — suddenly felt distant.

I am listening to an old Ram Dass book. Not a coincidence that I just read his chapter about the ego’s insistence on identity. It clings to roles because they feel safe, familiar, proven. When we return to old environments, the ego doesn’t want to introduce the new us. It prefers to resurrect the old us — the one that others recognize, the one that knows how to belong.

And here’s the thing: those old layers don’t just vanish when you grow. They’re still there, waiting in the background. They show up as urges, reactions, or habits. The work is noticing them, peeling them back, and asking: Is this the me I want to show up as now, or the one my ego is trying to resurrect?

Growth is real, but fragile in familiar spaces. Guess this is why dieting can be so hard: at home in your own kitchen, the new habits feel easy. But step back into an environment full of old triggers — your parents’ pantry, a favorite restaurant, a celebration table — and suddenly the old you rushes back to the surface.

It’s not that you’ve failed at change. It’s that the environment is coded with memories of the old you. And the ego is more than happy to play that tape again.

This experience made me think about change management at work and realize why a big project momentum can feel like three steps forward and two steps back.

Cross-functional pods often step outside their day jobs to prototype new ways of working. They create possibility, test collaboration, and imagine futures the system hasn’t yet caught up to. But when they return to their “home teams,” the gravitational pull of the old ways is strong.

Scaling becomes difficult not because people resist change, but because the environment whispers: remember who you are here.

Seeing this in myself gave me empathy for where we are in our big strategic project. Transformation isn’t just about building the pod that invents something new. It’s about what happens when those people return to the mothership, where the old identity still lives.

Moving from the old you to the new you is not a clean break. The old layers don’t simply disappear. They linger, and sometimes they get louder when you return to familiar containers.

Change management—personal or organizational—isn’t about eliminating resistance; it’s about choosing alignment each time the old story resurfaces. In the rhythm of my days and nights lately, that looks like the quiet discipline of choosing who I am becoming over who I’ve been.