“Change happens anyway. Make friends with it. Then make it work for you!”
~ Jim Sebastian Sharman
The Introduction in my book, “INSPIRE Starts With I”, concluded with the idea of consistency. What better way to lead on from there than to address its opposite – “change”! It’s one of the themes you will notice throughout the passages, and I make no apology for the apparent contradiction.
Because change has taught me a lot in my life – it’s a consistent element of it – and our response to it is what matters.
Change happens. Instantaneously. And always – click! – like that.
From the microsecond you make a decision, or act upon an impulse, the situation has changed – or, at the very least, your perception of it has changed. That change then impacts everyone and everything around you.
However, it can take us a while to realise it or benefit from it. The trick is to spot the exact moment when it happens within you, or when you sense it happening from outside – and then to embrace it, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel.
Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Experience is not what happens to a person; it is what a person does with what happens to them.”
Everything that happens to us has the potential to affect what happens in us, and just because something “bad” might happen to us, it doesn’t have to result in us feeling “bad”. That’s a choice we make.
Most of the time, we do this subconsciously, so the trick here is to raise our awareness of what’s happening within us at all times, especially in response to what we perceive as negative stimuli. Often, that takes more courage than we feel we have!
We are greater than the sum of our experiences, and we can use this to our advantage. Once we open ourselves to what we can learn from them, we can subsequently succeed in applying that knowledge.
Even then, there are positive and negative ways to apply it; we can label ourselves as victims of circumstance, or we can take responsibility for our own actions, thoughts, emotions, as well as our resulting responses.
We can either complain about things and give in to negativity or, rather than allowing ourselves to be adversely impacted, we can dig deep and resolve to affect the outcome positively.
So, this is about how you deal with circumstances. How you allow change from outside to impact on you is as much a choice as when change has been actioned by you. Here, then, I focus on the latter.
Each of us has the opportunity to influence that which we experience and then to learn from it, regardless of the actual outcome. What we do next with that experience helps to define who we really are. It’s about how we perceive said outcome.
It always comes down to choice.
When the change is your decision, note that it goes through three stages;
- The moment you make the decision to change.
- The moment you notice how your behaviour then starts changing.
- The moment others subsequently notice those changes in you.
Sometimes, it takes a while for you to realise that (1) and/or (2) have happened – sometimes, it takes a while for others to see – and sometimes, when you yourself have noticed your new behaviour, the time gap between you and others noticing can feel incredibly frustrating, especially if your change is a conscious one with the aim of improving your interactions!
Then you must practise patience – with yourself and with others – as well as the discipline to keep the desired changed behaviour going.
Even if it seems like others haven’t noticed, choose to continue because, usually, your intention is positive, and they’ll get it eventually, even if only subconsciously. And the crucial thing to remember about (3) is that acceptance is their choice alone to make; you can’t make it for them.
Conversely, when change happens to you or around you, and it was not your choice, you still have a choice – you can go back to the beginning of this piece and ask yourself if you will succumb to allowing that change to define you, or if you’ll embrace it and make it your own.
Consider the change-related situations you are going through at the moment – it could be about a relationship, a job, a project, your health, etc. – and assess how you feel you’re managing.
Ask yourself if you are resisting change or accepting it. Consider what you could do with the experience of reading this today and how it might influence your perception of what’s happening to, around and within you.
Will you simply allow yourself to be shaped by it, or will you make friends with it? Will you apply it to yourself on your own terms, and use it to shape, or reshape, your experience with renewed positivity?
