Making the most of change
To deal with change, perhaps the most valuable quality you can develop is flexibility. Form the habit of remaining open-minded and adaptable to new information and circumstances. When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, instead of becoming upset or frustrated, practise looking into the change or reversal for the opportunity or benefit it might contain.
The superior person
Superior people are invariably those who remain calm and keep their wits about them in the midst of unexpected turbulence. They keep themselves calm and unemotional by asking questions and seeking information when things do not work out as they expected. They deal with change by focusing on getting the facts before reacting. They develop the ability to cut through the confusion and ask questions such as “Why did this happen? How did it happen? How serious is it? Now that it has happened, what are the various things we can do?”
Robert Fritz, in his book ‘The Path of Least Resistance,’ makes a clear distinction between effective people and ineffective people. He says that ineffective people have a tendency to be in a reactive-responsive mode of behaviour much of the time. Instead of consciously and deliberately choosing their courses of action, they react to what is going on around them, and they respond to their emotions. And the very best they can hope for, in this mode of behaviour, is to get back to even, where they were before they became upset.
The superior person, according to Robert Fritz, concentrates his attention on his “future vision.” Whenever an unexpected change or setback occurs, the superior person immediately focuses her mind on where she wants to be at a future time. This future vision is something that she has planned and given a lot of thought to, so it is fairly easy to conjure up at a moment’s notice.
Since your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, when you deliberately insist upon thinking about your goal or your future vision, your mind immediately becomes calm and positive, and you feel in control. Superior people always choose the future over the past. They always ask, “What do we do now?” rather than lose time and energy by looking around for someone to blame or criticise. They keep themselves performing at their best by thinking and talking about a desired future state.
There is a little poem, “Two men looked out through prison bars. One saw the mud; the other saw the stars.” You can greatly improve your ability to deal with change by focusing your attention on the future, and by seeing the glass as half-full rather than half-empty.
Locus of control
The critical issue in dealing with change is the subject of control. Most of your stress and unhappiness comes as a result of feeling out of control in a particular area of your life. If you think about the times or places where you feel the very best about yourself, you will notice that you have a high degree of control in those places. One of the reasons why you like to get home after a trip is that, after you walk through your front door, you feel completely in control of your environment. You know where everything is. You can relax completely. You are back in control.
Psychologists call this the difference between an internal locus of control and an external locus of control. Your locus of control is where you feel the control is located for a particular part of your life. People with an external locus of control feel that they are controlled by forces outside of themselves. When people have an external locus of control, they feel a high degree of stress. And with an external locus of control, a person is very tense and uneasy about change of any kind. Change represents a threat that may leave the individual worse off than before.
On the other hand, people with an internal locus of control enjoy a high degree of self-determination. They feel that they are very much in charge of their life. They plan their work and work their plan. They accept a high degree of responsibility, and they believe that everything that happens, happens for a reason, and that they are the primary creative force in their lives.
Since the only thing over which you have complete control is the content of your conscious mind, your ability to deal with change begins with your taking full, complete control over the things you think. As Thomas Huxley said, “Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.” Since change is inevitable and continuous, it is how you think about what is happening to you that is most important in determining how change affects you, and whether you use it to your advantage or let it work to your disadvantage.
Fear of change
In his book ‘Celebrations of Life,’ Rene Dubos says that we fear change more today than ever before, and for less reason. The reason you fear change is because you are afraid that you will be worse off as a result. No one fears change that implies improvement. For example, if you learned that you were going to have to change your lifestyle because you had just won a lottery, this is not the kind of change that you would avoid or anticipate with dread. It is change that implies unpleasant surprises that you fear and become anxious about because it causes you to feel that you have lost a certain amount of control in that part of your life.
Your aim is to become a “change master,” to embrace change, to welcome change, and to ride the tides of change. You do this by taking control of the direction of change in your life and assuring that it is predominately positive and toward improvements you desire.
Clear goals
If you set clear goals for your work, for your family life, and for your personal development, then no matter what happens, you can concentrate your thinking on your goals and take a long-term view of your current circumstances. You can, in effect, rise above the challenges of the moment, and keep your eyes on the guiding stars of your life and your most cherished dreams.
With a clear idea of where you are going and what you want to accomplish, you develop resilience, which is the ability to bounce back rather than to break. You develop what is called the “hardy personality” and become the type of person who is resistant to the negative emotions that affect people who have no goals or direction.
Accept reality
A significant first step in dealing with any change is simply to accept the change as a reality. Acceptance is the opposite of rejection or resistance. Acceptance keeps your mind calm and positive. As William James said, “The starting point in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so.” The minute you accept that a change has occurred, and that you cannot cry over spilled milk, you become more capable of dealing with the change and turning it to your advantage.
In dealing with change, and that is to adjust your behaviours and actions to the new situation. Ask yourself, “What are all the things I can do to make sure that the worst possible outcome does not occur?” Sometimes we call this “damage control.” In the business schools, this is an important part of decision making, and it is called the “mini-max regret solution.” What can you do to minimise the maximum damage that can occur from an unexpected change or setback?
As you begin thinking of all the things you can do, you are adjusting your mind to the new information and preparing to take steps to deal with the change effectively to improve on the existing situation. Viktor Frankl said that the last great freedom of man is the freedom to choose his attitude under any given set of circumstances.
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