What Legos Taught Me About Change (And Why It Matters for You)

I recently started playing with Legos again.

As a kid, Legos were more my brother's thing, though back then we mostly had generic colored blocks rather than themed sets. We'd build elaborate towns together, invent stories for the characters, and after our first trip to Disney, we even constructed our own Lego Disneyland. None of my kids really caught the Lego bug, but last year my son gave me a flower bouquet set for Mother's Day, and working on it together reminded me how genuinely satisfying it feels to build something with your hands.

This year I got a couple more sets for my birthday. Something fun. Something analog.

I've been craving that more and more lately: time away from screens. So much of my life is spent on the computer that my free time has increasingly become about finding ways to truly unplug: reading, coloring, crafting. For a while, though, I didn't realize that what I thought was "downtime" wasn't actually restoring me at all. I was scrolling. Watching reels. Consuming without creating. My brain was busy but not resting; stimulated, but not nourished.
Sound familiar?

When "Easy" Isn't the Point
Here's what surprised me when I picked up those Lego sets: it wasn't easy. Lego instructions are entirely visual: no words, just photos of each step. And I am very much a multi-modal learner. I want the lecture, the book, and the notes all at once. Give me all the information. So a wordless picture book for assembling a complex structure? A little disorienting.

More than once, I assembled a section incorrectly and had to take it apart and start over.

In the past, that might have derailed me. The frustration could have spiraled: why can't I get this right, this is supposed to be fun, I'm making a mess of a children's toy. (You might be familiar with the inner voice I mean).

But instead, something different happened. I felt a quiet, steady determination. A calm certainty that I could figure it out, and that starting over wasn't a failure.  It was just part of the process.

I've been thinking about why that felt different. And I think it comes back to the work I've been doing, both personally and professionally.

Growing at the Edge of Your Comfort Zone
I've been training in a modality called Metaphors of Movement, and working with it has required me to stretch in ways that don't always feel comfortable. Learning new approaches means sitting with confusion, experimenting, getting things slightly wrong, and staying curious anyway.

The same has been true of IEMT (Integral Eye Movement Therapy), another approach I use with clients. Both were developed by Andrew Austin, and he describes the distinction between them in a way I find beautifully clear:

"When life has messed up the person (i.e. stuff happened to them) then IEMT is the model of choice. When it is the person who is messing up life (i.e. they are doing stuff to life) then MoM is a better choice."

IEMT helps process what happened to you. Metaphors of Movement helps shift the patterns you're creating, the subtle, often invisible ways we get in our own way, limit our own lives, or repeat cycles we can't quite see from the inside.

That distinction matters. Because many people arrive at therapy having done significant healing work. They've processed old wounds, made sense of their past, found their footing. And yet something still feels stuck. Life still isn't quite unfolding the way they'd hoped.

That's often where Metaphors of Movement becomes remarkable.

What This Means for You
If you've ever felt like you've done the work:  journaled, reflected, maybe even been in therapy before, and still find yourself running into the same walls, it may not be that you haven't healed enough. It may be that the next layer of change isn't about what happened to you. It's about discovering how you've been unconsciously shaping your experience since then.

That's subtle, important work. And it doesn't require you to have it all figured out before it starts helping.

Here's what struck me most in those Lego moments: the set got built. Even while I was confused, even while I backtracked, even while I checked the photos three times trying to figure out which piece went where, the thing came together. Piece by piece, step by step.

Metaphors of Movement works the same way with clients. Even as I'm still deepening my own fluency with it, even when I pause to check my notes mid-session, the process does something. Change happens, often in ways that feel surprisingly gentle and surprisingly lasting.

You don't have to wait until everything is perfectly understood to begin. You just have to be willing to sit with the process, and trust that starting over, or slowing down, or asking for help isn't failure.

It's just part of building something worth keeping.

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Curious whether IEMT or Metaphors of Movement might be a fit for what you're working through? I'd love to connect.