How You View Change Is How You Do Change - Part One

By: Kenneth Wallace
Submitted: 2007-01-17 15:36:28
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In 1971, Alvin Toffler’s book, Future Shock, shook the world. Toffler predicted that “millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future . . . many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time.” Thirty-five years later, we can say that Toffler has been proven correct in this assertion. And the ‘incessant demand for change’ continues unabated while the ‘painfulness in trying to keep up’ afflicts more and more people throughout the world.

An editorial in the Atlantic Journal offers the following observation:

“The world is too big for us. Too much going on, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It’s an incessant strain, to keep pace. . . . And still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly you’re out of breath trying to keep pace with who’s in and who’s out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can’t endure much more!”

These words state well what many people are thinking today. However, they appeared in the Atlantic Journal on June 16, 1833. Much has changed in the world since then yet our reaction to change has remained unchanged: we don’t like it, we’re easily confused and overwhelmed by it and we resist it!

Change by Consent or Coercion?

We seek to situate ourselves within the world in a manner that maintains physical, emotional and psychological equilibrium. Change challenges that equilibrium. In 1833 change was happening at what was thought to be an astonishing rate. It’s faster now. It can knock us off-balance and leave us down for the count – if we let it.

When external change occurs it forces us to change something about ourselves. And the toughest thing to change is our attitude toward change. We may not resist the idea of change but we do resist having to change anything about ourselves even if we know it’s in our best interest to do so. Perhaps this is what John Steinbeck meant when he said: “It is the nature of man as he grows older to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

As the adage goes, change is inevitable but growth from change is optional. If we are to make change work for us instead of against us, we must choose to change our attitude toward change. And this will require that we alter our thinking about ourselves and our world.

Security and Stability

The psychological reason why change elicits such a strong aversion in human beings is that we possess a strong need and craving for security and stability. This is manifested in the most basic human instinct: self-preservation. This primal instinct should actually be divided into two parts, each with equal strength of influence on the individual:

• preservation of one’s self

• preservation of one’s self-image

The fact that life exists at all can be a source of hope for the future. I can say to myself in times of discouragement, “at least I’m alive and have a chance to continue living; and I will fight with everything I have to preserve and expand my life into the future.” This sentiment is captured well at the end of “Gone With the Wind” when a forlorn yet defiant Scarlet O’Hara, hungry and having lost everything she valued in life, loudly proclaims to herself, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” Even in the midst of the uncertainty and distress that change often brings we can still solemnly pledge to reestablish the stability and security we once possessed, perhaps even on a grander scale, because we are yet alive.

When challenged by external circumstances to change ourselves we can choose either to give up, give in and “give out” (a colloquial expression meaning to be completely exhausted and/or overwhelmed) or to learn, adapt and transform into something different than before. Unfortunately, as Steinbeck observed, until we reach a point like this in life we will rarely consent to change anything about ourselves, largely because we don’t really have to. However, as Dr. W. Edwards Deming, founder of the quality management movement, quipped, “it is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

The second aspect of the human instinct toward self-preservation, the preservation of one’s self-image, speaks to the resistance we have to any idea, behavior, or process that threatens our existing beliefs. Our self-image is the composite of our strongly held beliefs about ourselves and the world. We prefer to continue believing what we believe at any given moment. It’s like Newton’s First Law of Motion: “a body at rest tends to remain at rest or a body in motion tends to remain in motion at a constant speed in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.” Our thinking and believing tend to travel along the same route within the myriad of mental connections within our brains. This is why changing from the inside is such a difficult endeavor and why our attitude toward change (being against it) is so hard to modify.

Since we see the world not as it is but as we are, whenever the world changes around us it no longer remains a comforting reflection of the way we see ourselves. External change challenges us to adjust the way we see ourselves. This is the path of change most of us experience. We will change only when coerced rather than taking a proactive approach to crafting the change we want to effect. Until forced, we don’t much see the need to change. We prefer to react to change from the outside rather than create the kind of change we want from the inside.

The Truth Sets You Free, But Not Before It Hurts

Our innate predilection to react to rather than create change is partly because it is painful to change. The research of a Canadian neurosurgeon discovered some dramatic facts about the human mind’s reaction to change. He conducted various experiments that demonstrated that when a person is forced to change a fundamental belief or opinion, the brain undergoes a series of nervous sensations equivalent to distressing torture.

Change frequently involves facing the truth about yourself and your fundamental beliefs and admitting that you haven’t become or accomplished what you really wanted. An honest and thorough self-examination leads to freedom of the soul from self-doubts and deceits. But the truth that sets you free first hurts to see. And the prospect of pain, let alone the actual experience of it, is enough for most of us to avoid seeing what we must change about ourselves in order to experience the joy, wholeness and abundance that are the fruits of freedom. Sadly, the numbness of enslavement to conformity is preferred to the passing pain of change that leads to true and lasting inner freedom.

The psychological spot in our lives that “contains” our existing beliefs is commonly called a comfort zone – a place of perceived stability and security. It is the place to which we retreat when change is thrust upon us, within which we wish not to be disturbed and out of which we desire not to be drawn.

When change needs to occur because things would be better if they did, the comfort zone becomes a rut; and a rut, as the famous motivator, Earl Nightingale, once said is nothing more than a grave with the ends kicked out. Many of us can be found hiding in our comfort zones shielding ourselves from a future we perceive as being filled with insecurity and instability. One day we wake up to find ourselves in a grave we dug ourselves. From that point on we either change the view we have of ourselves or life simply passes us by.

As Sydney Harris says, “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we want is for things to remain the same but get better.” If this attitude occurs, we suffer the effects of insanity that Albert Einstein defined as: “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.” Change can drive us insane or it can be the means of tremendous growth far greater than we can imagine from the constricted confines of our comfort zones.

Another reason we resist change is that there are so few people actually engaged in making it happen. Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince,” “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

Being at the forefront of anything that is perceived to be significantly different from that with which the prevailing culture has grown comfortable is to put yourself in an uncomfortable place. Since we are mainly reactive and operate primarily out of our comfort zones, we find ourselves being enemies of change or merely lukewarm defenders of those who work to make it happen. This is another way of saying that we seek equilibrium within our lives that makes us feel secure and stable as we look into the future. We don’t want to feel the insecurity and instability that often accompany stepping into the vanguard of change. It frightens us even to think about it.

Hurt Your Hurt, Frighten Your Fear

Change is not something to be feared. Rather, it is something we should welcome, for without change nothing in this world would ever grow or blossom and no one would ever move forward to become the person they want to be.

How do we get to the point where we’re actually welcoming change instead of resisting it? You must first learn to manage fear, especially your fear of change.

Years ago, when my children would hurt themselves, I’d tell them to “hurt your hurt” and have them pretend to grab a hold of the place where it hurt, throw it on the ground and then stomp on it. This activity objectified their pain and gave them a semblance of control over it as well as an awareness of a future that did not contain the pain. It provided them with an understanding that they were greater than their pain because they were not equal to their pain. They could see that pain was something that occasionally happened to them but that it should never define or limit their self-image or the possibilities for their future.

This same approach applies to fear. As Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “you gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Another way of saying this is that you must frighten your fear instead of fearing your fear, as Eleanor’s husband, Franklin, instructed Americans on the eve of World War II not to do. Look your fear in the face and confidently go through it instead of shrinking from it. When you do this, your fear will do the shrinking. Otherwise, you will wind up fitting the description of an empty and pitiful person offered by Eleanor’s Uncle Teddy: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Fear stops us from achieving much of what we’re capable of achieving because we’re afraid of our fear. We’re scared that our fear will take over when we attempt great things and cause us to fail. Elbert Hubbard was right when he said, “the greatest mistake you can make is to be continually fearing you will make one.” Frighten your fear by facing it with the willingness to fail in doing so. When fear realizes it has a strong adversary facing it, one who is prepared for failure in the passionate pursuit of freedom from spiritual and psychological enslavement, it always backs down and quickly loses strength.

Fear cowers in the presence of confidence and courage. As with my children’s activity of “hurting their hurt” this way of managing fear objectifies it and gives you inner control over it resulting in an awareness of a future that is not ruled by it. You realize that you are greater than your fear because you are not equal to it. Fear is something that happens to you from time to time but it is never something that should define and limit your self-image and potential for future greatness and abundance.

Leon Martel, in “Mastering Change, the Key to Business Success,” describes three common traps that keep us from recognizing and using change:

1. Believing that yesterday’s solutions will solve today’s problems

2. Assuming present trends will continue

3. Neglecting the opportunities offered by future change

You must plan to change with a plan for change. Otherwise, you will be forced to change without a means to fashion its character and dimensions. What you have to plan for is how you’re going to grow both from the change that you choose to create and the change that will happen without your consent. Growth can occur both from what you make happen and what you make of what happens.

Read Part Two of this article for effective ideas on how to implement your personal plan for growth from change.

Article source: Expert Articles