A few years ago I moved to the U.S. with a goal to set up an analytics team for a large convenience store chain.
Two months later, after a couple of sleepless nights, I stood in my living room looking at my suitcases. I’d already started packing. My plan was to tell my employer on Monday that this wasn’t working and that I was moving back home.
The move itself wasn’t the problem. Going from a small European country to another continent was a big shift, but I was handling that fine. I was quite enjoying the winter weather in Phoenix.
Work was the issue. I didn’t fully understand my role. Expectations seemed to shift weekly, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel competent. That bothered me more than anything.
If I already felt this lost two months in, what would the next year look like?
While packing, I came across some old notes from a leadership course I had taken. One page had a simple graph: the cycle of change.
Understanding that didn’t magically fix anything. But it stopped me from making a permanent decision in what was clearly a temporary phase.
So I made a deal with myself: give it a year. If I still felt miserable after that, I would go home.
Long story short, the confusion settled, the work started to make sense, and the experience turned into something I’m very glad I didn’t walk away from.
Emotional cycle of change
You’ve likely seen this model before, but it’s worth stripping away the theory and looking at the five phases (plus one I’d like to add) for what they actually are:
1. Uninformed Optimism: You’re excited because you don’t yet see the friction. The opportunity looks bigger than the obstacles.
2. Informed Pessimism: Reality sets in. The workload is heavier than expected. The gaps in your knowledge become obvious.
3. Valley of Despair: Confidence drops. You question whether you’re capable or whether this was a mistake. This is usually where people are most tempted to quit.
From here, most people choose one of two paths:
a) Quit and move to something new, where optimism returns because the friction isn’t visible yet. Phases 1 and 2 feel exciting again precisely because they’re unknown.
b) Push through to stay long enough for competence to catch up with reality. This is what leads to informed optimism and, eventually, real capability.
The valley is the moment where growth becomes optional.
4. Informed Optimism: You’re not comfortable yet, but you’re no longer lost. You’ve found patterns. You see progress.
5. Success and Fulfillment: The new role or challenge becomes normal. You’re competent. The effort feels proportionate to the reward.
6. Maintenance: Eventually, what was once hard becomes routine. The stretch disappears. Performance stabilizes, but growth slows.
This is the phase when things feel too easy or predictable, people are likely to start looking elsewhere for challenges, because stagnation is uncomfortable in its own way.
Left unmanaged, this is where high performers disengage or leave in search of the next climb.
Managed well, this is where you deliberately raise the bar: expand scope, rotate responsibilities, introduce new problems worth solving.
Why This Matters for Your Team
You probably recognize these phases in yourself. As a leader, your job is to recognize them in others, and call them out early.
Almost every new employee who joins your team will go through these phases. Most of them will hit some version of the valley and secretly doubt if they made the right move or if they should just cut their losses and leave.
Managing change is as much about timelines and deliverables as it is about understanding that performance dips are often emotional before they’re technical.
Since that experience, I’ve made it a point to keep this cycle visible.
In 1:1s, when a strong performer suddenly sounds cynical or unsure, I don’t jump straight to metrics. I reassure them that this part is normal. It feels worse than it is.
Often just labeling the phase reduces the panic.
With the team, when we start something new, I’ll say upfront that at some point this will feel harder than expected. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Setting that expectation changes how people interpret the dip when it comes.
People rarely leave because work is hard. They leave because they think hard means something is broken in them or in the company.
If you normalize the valley, people don’t panic when they hit it. They stay steady long enough to move through it.
Sometimes that’s the difference between someone quitting and someone staying long enough to grow.
See you next week
- - Good Enough