How to Survive Change . . . You Didn't Ask for. M. J. Ryan
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the amount of information in the world to double. It's now doubling at the rate of once every two years. No wonder we're scrambling to keep up!
What's puzzling about this absence of training in AdaptAbility is that companies all know that their employees' capacity to change is one of the key factors in business success. According to the Strategic Management Research Center, for instance, the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions is as much as 60 to 70 percent. Why? Not because it's not a good idea to bring two organizations together to create efficiencies and synergies, but because the people in them fail to adapt to the changed circumstances. I was just speaking yesterday to a woman in a huge oil company who had been part of an effort to create a standardized process for gathering information across departments. She'd left to work on another project and discovered that, two years and millions of dollars later, the effort had failed. Why? Because employees kept using the old system they knew, rather than learn the new one.
Examples of the lack of ability to change don't have to be that expensive or dramatic. They happen every single day right where you live and work. I would say at least half of the folks I coach on a weekly basis are looking for help adapting to new positions or circumstances where they must drive results in a different way than they have before. The behaviors that have gotten them where they are today are simply not working. And these are all folks who have jobs—those without work need even more support in learning new skills and attitudes.
Resisting change wears down our bodies, taxes our minds, and deflates our spirits. We keep doing the things that have always worked before with depressingly diminishing results. We expend precious energy looking around for someone to blame—ourselves, another person, or the world. We worry obsessively. We get stuck in the past, lost in bitterness or anger. Or we fall into denial—everything's fine, I don't have to do anything different. Or magical thinking—something or someone will come along to rescue me from having to change. We don't want to leave the cozy comfort of the known and familiar for the scary wilderness of that which we've never experienced. And so we rail against it and stay stuck.
When the environment changes and we must therefore, too, it's appropriate to complain—to take, in the words of Dr. Pamela Peeke, the BMW (Bitch, Moan, and Whine) out for a little spin. But soon it's time to put it back in the driveway and get down to business. And that means developing AdaptAbility.
In a very real way, what is being asked of us now is no more or less than to become consciously aligned with what life has always required on this planet. In 1956, the father of stress research, Hans Selye, wrote in his seminal work, The Stress of Life, “Life is largely a process of adaptation to the circumstances in which we exist. A perennial give and take has been going on between living matter and its inanimate surroundings, between one living being and another, ever since the dawn of life in the prehistoric oceans. The secret of health and happiness lies in successful adjustment to the ever-changing conditions on this globe; the penalties for failure in this great process of adaptation are disease and unhappiness.”
My goal is to offer you a way to relate to the change you're facing with the least wear and tear and the greatest potential not merely to survive, but to thrive during the greatest period of transformation humans have ever experienced. We are all being called on to stretch mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into the future. It's my hope that this book offers you both comfort and practical support as you take on this challenge, and may what you learn here help you become a Change Master.
Top Ten Change Sinkholes
1 getting stuck in denial
2 becoming paralyzed by fear and/or shame
3 spending a lot of time and energy on blame and/or regret
4 believing there is nothing you can do
5 focusing on the problem, rather than the solution
6 using only solutions that have worked in the past to solve new problems
7 “Yes, but”ing all options
8 not getting in touch with what gives you meaning and purpose
9 going it alone
10 resisting or refusing to learn new things because it takes extra effort
Don't worry. In this book, you'll learn how to avoid these danger zones and stay positively focused and moving forward.
II
Seven Truths About Change
Since we live in a changing universe, why do [humans] oppose change? . . . If a rock is in the way, the root of the tree will change its direction. . . . Even a rat will change its tactics to get a piece of cheese.
—Melvin B. Tolson
HERE YOU LEARN THE fundamentals of AdaptAbility that will hold you in good stead no matter what wave is heading your way. These understandings will allow you to accept the need to adapt and learn how to get your brain on your side (or, more accurately, the two parts of your brain which are involved in change). With these truths in your hip pocket, you are well on your way toward being able to surf the monster waves of change.
CHANGE TRUTH #1
Change Is the One Thing You Can Count On
Only in growth . . . and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Christopher Hildreth owns a business installing high-end wood flooring. During the refinancing boom in this decade, his business grew to $4 million. As the economy has slowed, demand for his products has shrunk. Competitors are offering much lower prices and customers have less spare cash to choose the high-end option—if they can afford new floors at all. This development has taken him totally by surprise. In an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, he says, “[I] figured it would just roll along and I would do my estimates and the phone would ring. . . . I would have thought that by now I'd be riding the crest of a wave.”
Contrast that response to my client Al's. When I asked him, the CEO of a real estate development company in Las Vegas, how he was doing in the downturn, he confided, “I knew the real estate boom couldn't go on forever. So I created a rainy day fund. I'm not only using it to tide me over, but to buy out troubled developers around town.”
Smart man, Al. He knows intuitively there is only one sure thing in life—that things will change. How and when none of us know. But that everything will is absolutely guaranteed. The Buddha called this awareness the First Noble Truth—the fact that everything in life is impermanent. Fighting against that truth only causes us suffering, he taught, because it's fighting against reality. Accepting that truth diminishes our suffering because we're in alignment with the way life is. When we accept that the only thing constant is change, we aren't so taken by surprise when the change occurs. Night follows day, winter follows summer, the moon waxes and wanes. Change happens.
I empathize with Christopher Hildreth because I, too, learned this lesson the hard way. Riding the wave of a couple of bestsellers as a book publisher, I kept expanding my company and had just bought a big new house when the largest returns in the industry rolled back through my door, leaving a deficit the company never could recover from. No matter how many predictions of future sales based on past sales we created, they were wrong because the whole industry was going through a game-changing shift. I wish I had planned for the boom not continuing forever. It would have prevented a lot of sleepless nights.
Even though most of us can't know for sure when and how change will hit us, we can at least keep in our awareness the simple fact that it will. And at a more rapid pace than ever before in human history. Our work and personal lives will change—guaranteed—and we need to be ready with the appropriate attitudes and actions so that, like Al, we minimize the negative impacts and capitalize on the opportunities. When we are aware of change, we can see the signs earlier, so we're ahead of the wave. This gives us a distinct advantage in responding.
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