We all live in a changing world and the greatest challenge we have, both in our business and personal lives is quite simply the challenge of change. Being willing to Anticipate, Accept and to Adapt. So often, it is practically impossible for us to realize the incredible amount of change that we must contend with in our daily lives. I’d like you to use your imagination with me for just a moment, to see if perhaps we can help you get a handle on change.
– Assume that it’s your 50th birthday. Now imagine that 50 years of your existence represent mankind’s total time on earth, whether that’s 24,000 years or five billion years.
Now if that was the case, if you were 50 years old today and the 50 years of your life represented mankind’s total existence upon earth, and you began to reflect over your life, there would be a few things that you would remember.
You’d remember that it was just ten years ago today when you were 40 years of age, that the last of your friends moved out of the caves that they used for homes; it was just three years ago today when you were 47 that Jesus Christ was born; and about 18 month ago someone names Thomas Edison invented something called the incandescent light bulb; as you went to sleep last night you heard the first radio play; and sometime during the course of the evening while you were asleep, the first aeroplane flew; when you awoke this morning, you saw the first television; and when you began to read this paragraph, at that moment the first man walked upon the moon. Given that rate of change, how much change must we contend with in the next few years?
Resistance to Change is potentially one of our most damaging failures. When we think in terms of change, and being able to adjust to the changes in our environment, most of us have difficulty in doing so and we have all of excuses for it.
If we are really honest about it, most of us would like to see our children change, , there are some of us who would like to see our spouses change and I think most of us want to see our managers or our employers to change. We love change. We love changing other people; the problem is in changing ourselves.
Change takes us outside of our comfort zone. Doing something new causes us to step out and lose the comfort of being able to do things the wat we have always done.
We fear we have to give up something.
Ask yourself this – If I walked into an office, a factory, wherever, and I pulled the workers together and I said: “Hey, I’ve just had a note from management, we are about to change the commission/wage structure.”
How many people did you honestly believe would think that the money was going up? Not many. Most would think that the money would be going down. It’s a natural instinct that the prospect of change invokes a fear of loss. Why? Because in the past we’ve had change and we’ve often ended up losing something in the process.
Nothing is ever static in the world, and we need to understand that all change requires a certain amount of discomfort, and we should actively seek that. Change is always inevitable, but it doesn’t always HAVE to be.