the attitudes and behaviors you need in order to move successfully through each phase. The final part is called “Strengthen Your AdaptAbility,” which is a process of noticing what you've learned and recording it so you can use it again when needed—which of course you will because adapting to life is a never-ending process.
You may be at one or another of these phases as you pick up this book. As I always say, do the practices and take the advice that seems most helpful to you. Everyone is distinct, confronting unique challenges, and in need of different support. Whatever you're facing, I want to encourage you to use this book as a life preserver, enabling you to better understand and navigate the shifts that change will require in you.
As you go through this journey, you'll learn the following:
our bodies' physical and emotional reactions to change
the mental and emotional qualities of a Change Master
why self-care is crucial
how to live with uncertainty and to respond in as positive and healthy a way as possible
how to identify new opportunities
how to use what's happening to align even more with your talents and values
As with my previous books, this book incorporates insights from brain science, organizational and positive psychology, spirituality, and my own brand of New England pragmatism. In these pages, you'll learn all the tools, techniques, attitudes, and behaviors I know of to be a Change Master. I'll offer many examples from my work with Professional Thinking Partners (PTP), a firm that helps people recognize and develop their unique talents and use them to maximize individual success and collaboration with others. PTP has worked with tens of thousands of individuals in dozens of large and small companies, nonprofits, and governmental agencies around the world. You'll meet PTP's lead consultant Dawna Markova, PhD, who has taught me many of the approaches and techniques you'll find here. And you'll meet many of my clients and friends (in disguised form to protect their confidentiality unless I use their full names), people just like you, dealing with the challenges of life as it is rapidly evolving.
As we face today's realities and try to adapt, it's not surprising that we may need support. Who among us took a class on how to cope with change? In the past, changes happened more slowly, and our need to adapt was much, much less. Here's just one example of the acceleration of change. Starting at AD 1, it took 1,500 years for the amount of information in the world to double. It's now doubling at the rate of once every two years. No wonder we're scrambling to keep up!
What's puzzling about this absence of training in AdaptAbility is that companies all know that their employees' capacity to change is one of the key factors in business success. According to the Strategic Management Research Center, for instance, the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions is as much as 60 to 70 percent. Why? Not because it's not a good idea to bring two organizations together to create efficiencies and synergies, but because the people in them fail to adapt to the changed circumstances. I was just speaking yesterday to a woman in a huge oil company who had been part of an effort to create a standardized process for gathering information across departments. She'd left to work on another project and discovered that, two years and millions of dollars later, the effort had failed. Why? Because employees kept using the old system they knew, rather than learn the new one.
Examples of the lack of ability to change don't have to be that expensive or dramatic. They happen every single day right where you live and work. I would say at least half of the folks I coach on a weekly basis are looking for help adapting to new positions or circumstances where they must drive results in a different way than they have before. The behaviors that have gotten them where they are today are simply not working. And these are all folks who have jobs—those without work need even more support in learning new skills and attitudes.
Resisting change wears down our bodies, taxes our minds, and deflates our spirits. We keep doing the things that have always worked before with depressingly diminishing results. We expend precious energy looking around for someone to blame—ourselves, another person, or the world. We worry obsessively. We get stuck in the past, lost in bitterness or anger. Or we fall into denial—everything's fine, I don't have to do anything different. Or magical thinking—something or someone will come along to rescue me from having to change. We don't want to leave the cozy comfort of the known and familiar for the scary wilderness of that which we've never experienced. And so we rail against it and stay stuck.
When the environment changes and we must therefore, too, it's appropriate to complain—to take, in the words of Dr. Pamela Peeke, the BMW (Bitch, Moan, and Whine) out for a little spin. But soon it's time to put it back in the driveway and get down to business. And that means developing AdaptAbility.
In a very real way, what is being asked of us now is no more or less than to become consciously aligned with what life has always required on this planet. In 1956, the father of stress research, Hans Selye, wrote in his seminal work, The Stress of Life, “Life is largely a process of adaptation to the circumstances in which we exist. A perennial give and take has been going on between living matter and its inanimate surroundings, between one living being and another, ever since the dawn of life in the prehistoric oceans. The secret of health and happiness lies in successful adjustment to the ever-changing conditions on this globe; the penalties for failure in this great process of adaptation are disease and unhappiness.”
My goal is to offer you a way to relate to the change you're facing with the least wear and tear and the greatest potential not merely to survive, but to thrive during the greatest period of transformation humans have ever experienced. We are all being called on to stretch mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into the future. It's my hope that this book offers you both comfort and practical support as you take on this challenge, and may what you learn here help you become a Change Master.
Top Ten Change Sinkholes
1 getting stuck in denial
2 becoming paralyzed by fear and/or shame
3 spending a lot of time and energy on blame and/or regret
4 believing there is nothing you can do
5 focusing on the problem, rather than the solution
6 using only solutions that have worked in the past to solve new problems
7 “Yes, but”ing all options
8 not getting in touch with what gives you meaning and purpose
9 going it alone
10 resisting or refusing to learn new things because it takes extra effort
Don't worry. In this book, you'll learn how to avoid these danger zones and stay positively focused and moving forward.
II
Seven Truths About Change
Since we live in a changing universe, why do [humans] oppose change? . . . If a rock is in the way, the root of the tree will change its direction. . . . Even a rat will change its tactics to get a piece of cheese.
—Melvin B. Tolson
HERE YOU LEARN THE fundamentals of AdaptAbility that will hold you in good stead no matter what wave is heading your way. These understandings will allow you to accept the need to adapt and learn how to get your brain on your side
