Two Tips for Successfully Embracing Change

To paraphrase Yuval Noah Harari writing in Sapiens, human history is long periods of progress broken up but sharp, short periods of change.

For all of us those sharp periods came fast and continued poking up like spikes on a conveyer belt over the past 15ish months and now were changing again.

All of us will resist change in some form or fashion. When we recognize that we're resisting a change (or maybe are told we're resisting :) there are two steps we can take to embrace the change.

First is to examine our mindsets or attitudes about the change, which are are born from our scripts (some of which have been around since childhood). An effective way to do this examination is to write down our beliefs on one side of a page then on the other side write down an alternative to that belief. It may help to pretend we're looking at the beliefs of someone else who has asked us to help them with the same exercise. This sounds simple, but isn't easy because our brain wants to cling to the beliefs that keep us "safe" (which may be true in the immediate term, but not so much in the long term). When we get stuck on finding an alternative a way to kick start our thinking is to ask "what if that wasn't true what would have to be true?"

Second is to examine the activities we're doing (or not doing) that we're doing to resist change. Then doing a similar exercise as above to figure out which activities would support embracing change. "Do the opposite" is an easy trap that our lazy brain wants us to fall into so if we catch ourselves thinking "just to the opposite" that's a moment to stop and challenge our thinking.

What we may discover is that our resistance comes from a place of selfishness and a mindset of limitation. We all need support while we're changing, especially when we have crabs in our life pulling us back, so sharing this exercise with others and asking for support is crucial to adjusting both our mindsets and our activities.

Until next time... go succeed.