The only constant today – is change.
Lightning-fast, constant and never ending change.
And it can be one of the greatest gifts in the world or it can overwhelm and cripple our ability to move forward each day doing our best.
Learning to not just manage change, but to thrive through change, is a skill that can be taught, learned and mastered.
Those who don’t learn that skill do so at their own peril and at the peril of those around them.
A SIMPLE LESSON FROM RECENT HISTORY.
From time immemorial and certainly in the 20thcentury things moved slower. – a lot slower.
People had a job for life. Competition was not intense. People had patience. Fast forward to a world where we can have instant delivery of emails, texts, photos, information, movies, music, entertainment, near instant delivery of food, a car to take us anywhere on a moments notice, access to the entire world of things at our fingertips in a little magic box.
Only 130 years ago we didn’t even have telephones and the advertising claims of toilet paper companies was that they had less slivers than the competition – Really!
We only had radio in the 1920’s. Tiny black and white TV’s became available to the masses at a high price in the 1950’s. Cell phones only became prevalent in the 90’s, followed by the internet. Iphones and similar smart phones have only existed since 2007.
Today the average person receives – more than 68 texts, 52 emails, 17 phone calls and unending contacts from the world each day bombarding their senses and demanding their time and attention. For millennials and Gen Z, the number of daily hits can be double or triple as much.
For TV shows in 1960 average camera hold time was 15-20 seconds, and there were usually a wide shot and a close up- that’s it.
Today average hold time in a show is 2-3 seconds and rarely longer than 5 seconds with many cuts happening in less than 1-2 seconds. And there are 6-8+ camera angles as well as motion cameras, drones shots and CGI, all capturing and creating lightning fast realities and motion that doesn’t event exist in the actual world.
We are bombarded with sounds, sights, thoughts, feelings and a constant barrage of input like never before in the history of humanity.
There is exponentially more information constantly overwhelming our senses every day.
To keep up in this ever changing world today we must do everything better and faster than ever before.
Pressure can crush or pressure can create diamonds.
The good news is that the ability to thrive in change can be learned, practiced and mastered.
CHANGE AND THE HUMAN FIGHT, FREEZE, FLIGHT RESPONSE
Human beings are designed to crave among other things, certainty, predictability and stability. It is the need to feel safe and calm.
Yet we live in a world where the fight-freeze-flight system is constantly being engaged and triggered. And make no mistake, we are actually extraordinarily adept at dealing with change, if we have trained ourselves to turn fear and stress into focus and power rather than letting it shut us down or burn us out.
As a general rule, people (at least 89% of us) habitually resist change with every fiber of our being. And even the other 11% naturally and often intensely resist change as well. Not because we are foolish or stupid or lack ability, but because we have basic wiring for survival that served us well and kept our ancestors alive when they faced real mortal threats.
Human beings survived because of a highly evolved fight-freeze-flight system – the more reactive it was, the more likely we survived long enough to reproduce. Calm human beings were eaten and killed, while our jumpy and jittery ancestors were fruitful and multiplied.
Fast forward into a world where, at least in advanced world economies, we rarely face true threats to our personal safety. Rather we face threats to our emotional safety.
The fear of failure, the fear of being judged, the fear of being less than, the fear of rejection, the fear of the unknown.
We are wired when facing true threats to either amp up all of our strength to fight, to freeze or to run as fast as possible to escape danger.
But in the world we live in, the first response – fight – does not go over well. Physical aggression in a workplace or social environment is just not acceptable behavior.
Escape or flight, is also not productive in the workplace. Avoiding situations or experiencing ongoing fear, stress, anxiety or massive discomfort rather than facing challenges head on leads to misfunction, dsyfunction and failure.
So you can’t attack and you can’t run at work. What’s left of our basic survival responses?
The final response of freezing.
In nature if we froze and became “invisible” to predators we survived. Literally being immobile and frozen was a lifesaving hardwired response to threats.
Freezing at work, however, can lead to the opposite result and yet, because of our biology, is what many instinctively do, when under pressure.
RESISTING CHANGE IS A PRIMARY HUMAN RESPONSE
Resisting change is actually hardwired as a primary or first response, in the human software.
We learn when we are young children very quickly and lock in that learning for the long term. Ride a bike once and you always remember. Receive severe punishment for not conforming and creativity can be hampered for a lifetime.
And if the mechanism works the way it was designed to work, if we grew up in a perfectly supportive environment with all of the right challenges in the right order we could all have grown into adults who had extraordinary skills, mindsets, beliefs, resilience, intuition and ability to achieve, solve problems and be resilient in the face of any challenge.
And that would all be locked in so we wouldn’t want it to change.
But who had the perfect upbringing? We all did the best we could with what we had, right?
Which means that most people have unconscious programming that doesn’t serve us in the best way possible. And it’s somewhat locked in unless intentionally reprogrammed.
We are perfectly imperfect and if we are wise, we try to improve our abilities to become better versions of ourselves each day.
So when faced with massive changes what do most people do? We resist. We fall back on old habits. We dig in our heels. We do what allowed us to succeed in the past. But what worked when things were different doesn’t work now.
So as the stress increases, we resist harder.
And so a vicious cycle of workplace and life stress intensifies.
MANAGERS’ TYPICAL RESPONSES TO RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
The typical management response to the resistance to change falls into a few categories:
Attempt to train people on the new systems or direction
Attempt to logically explain the value of the new and better way
Attempt to explain that it will be easier in time
Or
Criticize or punish those who fail to move in the new direction
Put pressure on those who show resistance
Terminate those whose resistance persists
The challenge with any of these responses is that they all assume that people, who want to change, will simply do so.
BUT the resistance to change IS a normal human response. Wanting to change doesn’t help us change. Ironically, that stressor can make us more resistant to change, not less.
Before people can deal with change – THEY, themselves, have to change.
We have to change to be able to deal with change.
To thrive in change, people have to change their readiness for change.
People need to be trained to take command of the fight, freeze flight system and use it to their advantage.
* We need to be trained to embrace and be excited about change and challenge.
* We need to develop flexibility and resilience.
* We need to develop a mindset that embraces change as part of life and a good part of life.
* We need to learn to see change as a good thing – to actually really believe it in their gut.
And in order to do so, above all else, first, we need to feel powerful and capable in the face of change.
FEAR DESTROYS OUR ABILITY TO CHANGE
Fear shuts us down. Fearful people become discouraged. People without courage become more fearful and go into survival mode. In survival mode there is no creativity, no flexibility, no teamwork, no positivity, no focus on goals. In survival mode the only focus is to survive.
And in survival mode, we resist change with everything we have.
In survival mode, even if we want to change, we can’t.
When we are trained to be powerful, flexible, creative, excited by change, curious, determined, confident, hopeful, resilient and unstoppable, change becomes fuel to make us stronger.
When you are the champion, you don’t fear change, you embrace it. When you are the hero you step into the unknown – knowing that you will find a way or, if necessary, make a way, whatever it takes.
When you are a tribe of honorable warriors you step forward into uncertainty with certainty about yourself and your team.
HOW DO WE LEARN TO THRIVE IN CHANGE?
The ability to thrive in change is a skill. It’s a muscle. It’s an ability that must be:
* first taught & learned
* then practiced
* then mastered.
And it’s not one and done.
The ability to thrive in change is a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly to get stronger.
You don’t build a muscle by reading about it or hearing how muscles are built (though the information is useful and helps when it comes time to actually act).
You build a muscle by using it.
By lifting an appropriately challenging weight with right form to a point where it’s hard to do. You build muscles by pushing them beyond their current limits.
If you want to thrive in change, you have to train yourself and your team to thrive in change.
And life is very much a momentum game. An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion continues in motion until acted upon by an outside force.
It takes a massive amount of force to create liftoff of a rocket. A massive amount of force is needed to get it to escape the power of gravity. But once it’s in orbit it takes minor burst of energy periodically to maintain that orbit.
So to embrace change, to launch a resting object into motion, we must have an immersive experience that massively shifts us and helps us engage the muscles that allow us to thrive in change.
* We need to face and overcome several obstacles that require us the think and feel differently .
* We must learn to be confident and unstoppable.
* We must learn to turn fight flight into power.
* We must learn to flex in the face of change and challenge.
* We must learn to bring our cognitive and creative abilities back online rather than going into survival mode.
* We must unleash the hero that lies within all of us.
Once we have done that, the momentum will carry us forward.
We still need a boost on an ongoing basis, but we are now moving in the right direction.
And momentum works in our favor. The ability to thrive in change is self-reinforcing. The tools we learn allow us to succeed, to flex, to thrive. And so we use them more, because we are rewarded for using them with the success that comes to those who can flex and thrive through change.