My Change Experience
Your experience matters
What is My Change Experience?
If you’ve lived through change, you already have an experience worth preserving.
Most people don’t think of their own experience as something valuable. Yet every person experiences change from a different position, notices different things and understands events differently. That makes every experience a unique part of how change is actually lived.
Too much of what we think we know about change comes from expert opinion or polished success stories. What’s more, in matters of your experience, you are the real expert.
My Change Experience brings together first person accounts of lived change. This means accounts of change, by people like you.It is not a collection of expert opinion, best practice, case studies or inspirational success stories.
It is a public archive of personal experiences, shared by people who have lived through change themselves.
Some experiences describe major turning points. Others are about quiet moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Some arrive with clarity. Others raise more questions than answers. Some end in success. Others remain unfinished.
Each reveals something about what it means to experience change.
Why does it exist?
Our understanding of change remains incomplete when it is built primarily from the accounts that fit comfortably within existing ways of thinking.
My Change Experience exists because your experience matters. Change is one of the defining features of human life. Yet much of what we know about it comes from experiences that have already been interpreted, organised and turned into lessons, models, frameworks and methodologies.
In our efforts to understand change, we naturally look for coherence, patterns and explanations. These are valuable, but they also shape what we pay attention to. Experiences that are successful, coherent and easily explained are more likely to be remembered, shared and studied. Experiences that are uncertain, unresolved, contradictory or simply ordinary are often overlooked or dismissed.
My Change Experience exists to create space for the experiences that are too often left behind.
By preserving first person accounts of change as they were lived, this archive recognises that some of the richest insights into change are found not only in certainty and success, but also in uncertainty, struggle, ambiguity and the everyday experiences that rarely become part of the conversation.
Who can contribute?
Everyone has experienced some meaningful change in their personal life, work or community.
Your experience may relate to your personal life, work, family, health, education, faith, leadership, relationships or community. It may describe a life changing event or a seemingly ordinary episode that changed how you saw yourself, another person or the world around you.
It does not need to be dramatic or successful or feel complete or provide answers.
If it reflects something real about what it was like to experience change, it belongs here.
What kind of experience can you contribute?
Every experience of change is different. There is no right way to contribute.
Your experience…
- can be ordinary or life changing.
- can be personal, work related or about your community.
- can describe something that happened years ago or something you are still living through.
- can be short or long.
- can end with certainty, uncertainty or unanswered questions.
What matters is not how dramatic your experience is, but that it reflects what it was like to live through change.
Some examples include:
- Starting a new job.
- Leading a team or a project.
- Losing or finding a sense of purpose.
- Becoming a parent.
- Caring for someone.
- Recovering from illness.
- Moving to a new place.
- Leaving a relationship
- Losing someone
- Retirement.
- A conversation that changed how you see someone.
- A change that is still unfolding.
Before you share your experience
No. Every meaningful experience of change has value. Some describe major life events. Others reflect quieter moments that changed how someone saw themselves, another person or the world around them.
No. Change is often ongoing. You’re welcome to write about an experience that is still unfolding or one you are still trying to understand.
There is no required length. Some experiences take only a few paragraphs. Others are much longer. Write only what you feel is necessary.
Yes. If you prefer, you may publish your experience using a pseudonym rather than your own name.
Your experience will be published in your own words. Minor edits may occasionally be made to correct spelling, grammar or formatting, but the meaning and voice of your account will not be changed.
Everyone has experienced some meaningful change in their personal life, work or community.
Experiences
The archive begins below.
These are first person accounts of lived change. These are not polished success stories or expert case studies. They are honest accounts of how change was actually experienced.
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