There is Light because there is darkness — To change, or not to change: Acceptance
Tags: Knowledge, Change, Mental Health, Acceptance, Self-awareness

Change is not something that happens to us, or around us. Change is in us.

For over a decade, I dedicated my time designing learning solutions for corporate employees, from courses on products and services, to programs for developing leadership skills. In all that, there was a recurring element that presented itself as a need for employees: change. No matter how many solutions we designed, their quality level and delivery method, or how many people in the company had gained the knowledge and understanding about the topic of change, there was always a need for implementing and improving how to deal with it.

In a business context, employee’s needs related to change can manifest themselves e.g. in the dynamics of a team when employees join or leave the company, or when acquisition and organizational restructuring activities transform operating models, processes, and people.

Since the 1940s, with Lewin’s original model for organizational change, many other change-management models have been developed and implemented, and most, if not all of these change models include components on leadership, communication, planning, training, culture and sustainment.

At an individual level, we experience and deal with change from an early age, from changes in school (e.g. changing classes, classmates and teachers every school year) to moving to a new location leaving friends behind. My earliest recollection of change is when my parents moved me to a large, elementary school where I started kindergarten, from a small, local school that was close to home. This new school was one hour away from home and I was picked up by a big school bus to which I could barely get on. I remember getting off the bus in a large parking lot, surrounded by children of all ages. I was scared, confused, and lonely, not knowing what to do, or where to go. It was a pretty big deal for a 4 year-old, and I want to believe I recovered from that shocking situation.

There could also be more impactful changes during one’s childhood, for example, those related to death and abandonment. Such kinds of changes can create traumatic experiences that mark how we navigate life as we grow up, and thus how we face and perceive change as adults. Norman Garmezy pioneered the term resilience, and led studies on healthy development of children affected by war, famine, poverty and other devastating realities. His contributions to developmental psychopathology and empirical studies of resilience are well known and recognized by scholars.

Change can be a dark, dangerous threat, or a guiding light signaling opportunity. What is your experience?

Resilience is defined in psychology as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. One of the strategies for building resilience includes efforts to accepting change as an integral part of life; I agree with this perspective. Based on my own observation and experience I know that regardless of change happening in our workplace or in our personal lives, change is easier to assume when we initiate or drive it, than when it feels imposed upon us or comes unexpectedly. I will go further to say that a better understanding of us as humans can provide a more rooted lens on the matter of change.

We are change.

From the moment we are conceived, we move from a germinal stage to an embryonic period, and finally a fetal period which lasts until birth. As human beings we are continuously transforming, everything in us is changing to form what we identify as a human being.

This transformation continues after birth and goes beyond the death of our physical body. I remember a friend telling me how she would contemplate her little one, in awe, every morning while she slept in her crib, getting bigger, growing overnight. At the same time, other friends have experienced the change of their parents getting old, growing into a different person from the one they remembered.

This change is not exclusive to our physiology. Our biochemical composition of mostly oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus changes throughout our lives regulating our brain function, hormones, energy levels, etc. From a biological point of view, our molecular structure of water, protein, lipids, carbohydrates and DNA plays a role in shaping our unique identity, also connecting us to our ancestors from whom we evolved, and to all other living things with which we share the same “raw matter”.

Our body contains hundreds of different types of cells, including non-human bacteria (microbiome), all of them continuously changing. Our hair and skin shed in cycles, the skin regenerating itself about every 27 days. Blood cells live on average 120 days, and are then recycled every second…

…anyway, you get the point: from multiple points of view, we change, constantly. Even our beliefs, goals, perspective on life, and pretty much everything else changes as we grow older, as we learn more about the world, when we read, meet people, work, etc. In other words, we change as we experience life.

Can we change our mind about something, our perspective on a particular topic? Of course we can! That too is part of our changing nature.

If we are change, why do we see it as “apart from us”?

So, we are 7.8 billion humans, who are all experiencing the changes I have described. Some of us work in groups, collaborating in projects, trying to figure out why there are changes imparted on us, forced on us. We are seeing change as apart from us, perhaps because that is all we have known, the way we have experienced change since childhood.

If we, on the other hand focus on seeing change as a part of us, then questioning the “why” of the change is no longer relevant, it is who we are, as is the environment we are part of. Someone at some point is going to change something, so this should not come as a surprise. That “someone” could be nature itself, as with life or death.

Change is not something we need to overcome, deal with, confront or survive. Change is part of us, innate to human nature and the environment we are connected to (i.e. other living beings, the world, and the universe).

Change is something we need to accept, as we accept our physiology.

Think of it as we would of another organ in our bodies. Sometimes the movements of that organ called change are subtle, rhythmic, almost imperceptible, but we know it is there. Other times its “beat” gets louder, faster, almost like a spasmodic contraction; it gets noticed and we pay more attention. So once in a while it seems as if all changes came to us at once, when in reality they have always been there, moving with a tone we did not perceive before.

If change were an organ, then, it would be one we could not live without.

In innovation, the term incremental relates to small improvements, nothing drastic but still something new. I can see how this concept relates to how we unconsciously change, second by second, day by day, without paying much attention. On the other hand the concept of disruption in innovation means major alterations, completely new business models, and new ways to operate; here is when we start making the change conscious, and talk about it.

We are (consciously and unconsciously) always changing inside, therefore everything we create (families, society, products, companies, culture) is always changing.

If change is in our nature, then rejecting it goes against who we are. How do we align to our nature when it comes down to change?

How would our view of “change” change if we accept that it is ingrained in us?

How can you embrace that view?

CAPER