12 Key Attitudes for Success: Attitude to Change

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2 – Attitude to Change

Underpinning any desire for success is a desire that things should be different. If you have already achieved success, you may not want anything to change, but most successful people I meet are not prepared to rest in the status quo. Achieving one success for them is the platform for the next success. Underpinning this is an attitude to change that enables success.

The Traffic Light Principle

The simplest way of thinking about change is to apply the traffic light principle: the things you want to start doing?(green), things you want to continue to do?(amber)?and the things you want to stop doing?(red). The challenge for the people I work with is that they can always find more?green?activities to start but don’t necessarily give enough attention to the?amber?things they need to continue doing. They don’t want to stop doing anything and put it in the?red?zone.

Change must be a balance between?green, amber?and?red.

You also need to count the cost of change: the giving up of those things that you are no longer going to be able to do but which you are familiar and comfortable with, the challenge of stepping into new things which may not be as easy as you’d hoped; the persistence required to continue doing the things that are going to make the difference.

Default preferences can hurt

So, what is your attitude to change? Are you one of those personalities who always loves the new and can’t wait to abandon the old? Or are you the kind of person who stays with things too long that you should have given up a long time ago? Or perhaps you are the kind of person focused on being intentional with what’s in the moment to make the most of what is in front of you today?

We tend to default to our preferences. But you need to understand your preferences and then take the time to work out whether your default is really serving you.

I am married to a wonderful woman who always wants to do the next thing and is ready to step into the new thing. I am probably one of those people who is reluctant to give up the old thing. Between us, we find a balance in our lives, which means we continue to move forward without losing the precious stuff we already have.

Engaging others as you change

Very few changes you want to make will leave others unaffected. Your attitude to changing with others is crucial to your success in achieving change. This is often about your capacity for personal leadership.

• Do you avoid difficult conversations about how your change will impact others?
• Are you so dependent on the approval and agreement of others that you give others an effective veto over the changes you want to make?
• Do you believe others can just ‘like it or lump it’ because you will make changes irrespective of their impact?
• Or do you explore the needs and motivations of others to align them with the changes you seek to make?

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The choice of attitude to others you take may change with the context. If you want to change from a DINKY couple (‘dual income, no kids yet’) to start a family, then ‘like it or lump it’ may not bring you the best possible outcome. On the other hand, a decision to resign before you have your next job may never be made if you let your colleagues exercise an effective veto over your choice.

Conclusions

We need to build our awareness of our attitude to change and our attitude to engaging others with our change. We all have default preferences of attitude to change, but as we understand the range of attitudes we could have, we can be more intentional about adopting the attitude that is most useful in each context.

An Attitude to Change for Success