I am sure you have heard the famous line from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: Change Is The Only Constant. Some people embrace change and some people tend to resist it. Today, let’s talk about how to navigate change without affecting our minds!
Have you ever heard the term managed growth? This used to be in fashion ten or so years ago and everyone and their brother used to throw the term around. In my experience, there is no such thing as managed growth. Either you grow or you shrink. There is nothing wrong with shrinking if that is what you want but to think that you can stay constant without growing or falling back is just a fantasy. Let’s talk about a couple of real-life examples.
Let’s start with corporate America. If you have followed IBM, you will notice that IBM has a history of struggles in the past 25 years. There challenge is to stay relevant in a constantly changing environment. They had CEOs who thought they can manage the company with what they were offering and just be at a certain level and keep the business going. It sure did not work and they had some spectacular declines. Then they had some CEOs who saw the landscape around them changing and embrace that change and transformed the company. Some companies adopt and some don’t. Look at Circuit City and Best Buy. Two chains with similar offerings, one is history and one is still relevant.
Now, this is just an example in the corporate world. The same is true in other areas of society and even in our personal lives. Change does not mean financial change either. Change to me is growth. I am sure all of us have changed from where we were 10 or 20 years ago. That is a good thing. We are better for it. It sure does not seem like it though when we are going through those changes. So how do we handle stress and anxiety that may flare up due to change?
First, let’s look at what brings that stress with change. As human beings, we are wired towards the status quo. Our mind interprets change as a threat. That begins this fight, flight, or freeze response in your system. Our system thinks it is protecting us from the change! The reason for this is that the pain of loss is usually a lot greater than the pleasure of gain. So if your pain of loss is x times higher than whatever pleasure you are going to get, why take that chance? This is the real dilemma. This is what brings stress with change. A Harvard Business Review article (https://hbr.org/2012/09/ten-reasons-people-resist-chang) outlined why people resist change. These reasons include Loss of Control, Excess Uncertainty, Concerns About Competence, Ripple Effects, Past Resistance among others. If you break this down, it all boils down to just one thing. Fear of failure. More specifically, the pain that comes from that failure.
So how do we handle this stress-induced change and more importantly embrace the change? First, let’s talk about handling stress that is caused by change. The first thing to do is to make sure that we understand the consequences of change. Often, we are stressing out because we are not prepared for change. If we look at the change in a rational way and see it through all its implications, we will be able to break down what preparations we need to make for different potential outcomes of change. Once we have clear ideas as to what can happen and how we may handle it, 90% of the stress goes away. Now, we are ready for that change. I had an interesting discussion with board members of a non-profit I am involved in. We have been growing like weeds in the past three years. Some members of the board are frightened by that growth. They think this growth will change the organization and I was trying to argue that it does and it will change the organization for the better. I tried to explain how big an impact we were making and that we needed to prepare for this and take certain actions now so that we are not caught off guard. You see some people like the status quo. Taking action means making decisions and bringing in change. They are just not ready for it. Maybe someday they will be but hopefully, it is not too late because if you don’t grow, you might end up shrinking.
So how do we embrace that change? We must look at what that change brings. What kind of positive outcome may be associated with the change. We also need to look at the negative outcomes of not embracing change. Once we are clear on this, oftentimes, change actually invigorates us rather than brings stress. Hope this makes some sense and you all look at it rationally next time you are confronted with change.