Tag: change

Change Your Mind, Change Your World

Today, let’s explore how a simple way of changing our minds can change our experiences. While researching this topic, I discovered that there is a book with the same name. How cool is that? So last session we talked about how Happiness is an inside job and how pain and pleasure are within us. How we let external conditions dictate our mood.

I am sure we all had some kind of problem today. It bothered us. It disturbed our peace. But if you think back, was that an external problem or an internal problem? I would bet a pretty penny it was an external problem. We let our external problems power to make us suffer. But it is all about perception. Say one day is going great. We feel like everything is going our way. Traffic is flowing smoothly, coworkers are on their best behavior, and so forth. The very next day, we feel like the whole world is against us. Someone cuts us off in the traffic, coworkers sound like they are demanding and whatnot. It is the same set of characters but we despise them! Why? Because our internal compass is off that day.

Let me tell you a story. I was driving through rural Mississippi about 20 years ago. I saw a small vendor on the roadside so I stopped. She was an old lady selling boiled peanuts. I bought a few and started talking with her. I asked her how her day was. She said it was an especially good day. I asked her what made that an especially good day. She said, well, I would make $20 today. Think about it! $20 was an especially good day. Granted I was in rural Mississippi in the early 2000s but still. She just had a particularly bright outlook on life you can tell. I bet she hardly had a bad day.

Everything depends upon our mind, including our sense of self. I think I may have talked about this in the past but let’s just reiterate. We all have this strong sense of self. Who we are. We are certain types of people, we do x and not y, and so forth. But if you think about it, this sense of self is not constant. It is ever-changing. Think about your 10-year-old self. I bet when you were ten, your sense of who you were was totally different from who you are today! Your 10-year-old self may not recognize who you have become. I am sure that’s true in my case. And you can say the same thing about your 20-year-old self and so on. So our sense of self is evolving. It is a good thing. And if we know it is constantly changing why are we hanging on to that sense of self? If we realize that our sense of self depends upon our thoughts, it becomes liberating! We are free to change our thoughts and in turn our sense of self. How cool is that?

Our sense of self is always based on our delusions. Our anger, jealousy, pride, attachment, and so on. But as long as it is an imputed sense of self, why not impute a happier state of mind? Because the universe gives us what we want. If we are always identifying ourselves as a tired, frustrated, and angry person then that is what the universe will give us. We do what we intend to do anyway. So why not create the intention to be happy all the time? If we are feeling completely rattled and overwhelmed, rather than identifying with that rattled and frustrated self, why don’t we tell ourselves, we are peaceful? We identify ourselves with our peaceful nature. We are this inherently peaceful person who happens to get rattled or frustrated every now and then. Now, we have changed the basis of our imputation all of a sudden. We are no longer identifying ourselves with the unhappy or angry but recognize that those are just our delusions that flare up from time to time.

We have talked about this before that we have the unlimited potential for peace. We are like this golden nugget that has some dirt on it. We recognize that we are not this dirty rock but actually a golden nugget with some dirt. As soon as we realize and accept that, we begin the work of removing the dirt from our golden nugget so we can be that peaceful person all the time.

Change Is The Only Constant

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.