With these truths in your hip pocket, you are well on your way toward being able to surf the monster waves of change.
CHANGE TRUTH #1
Change Is the One Thing You Can Count On
Only in growth . . . and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Christopher Hildreth owns a business installing high-end wood flooring. During the refinancing boom in this decade, his business grew to $4 million. As the economy has slowed, demand for his products has shrunk. Competitors are offering much lower prices and customers have less spare cash to choose the high-end option—if they can afford new floors at all. This development has taken him totally by surprise. In an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, he says, “[I] figured it would just roll along and I would do my estimates and the phone would ring. . . . I would have thought that by now I'd be riding the crest of a wave.”
Contrast that response to my client Al's. When I asked him, the CEO of a real estate development company in Las Vegas, how he was doing in the downturn, he confided, “I knew the real estate boom couldn't go on forever. So I created a rainy day fund. I'm not only using it to tide me over, but to buy out troubled developers around town.”
Smart man, Al. He knows intuitively there is only one sure thing in life—that things will change. How and when none of us know. But that everything will is absolutely guaranteed. The Buddha called this awareness the First Noble Truth—the fact that everything in life is impermanent. Fighting against that truth only causes us suffering, he taught, because it's fighting against reality. Accepting that truth diminishes our suffering because we're in alignment with the way life is. When we accept that the only thing constant is change, we aren't so taken by surprise when the change occurs. Night follows day, winter follows summer, the moon waxes and wanes. Change happens.
I empathize with Christopher Hildreth because I, too, learned this lesson the hard way. Riding the wave of a couple of bestsellers as a book publisher, I kept expanding my company and had just bought a big new house when the largest returns in the industry rolled back through my door, leaving a deficit the company never could recover from. No matter how many predictions of future sales based on past sales we created, they were wrong because the whole industry was going through a game-changing shift. I wish I had planned for the boom not continuing forever. It would have prevented a lot of sleepless nights.
Even though most of us can't know for sure when and how change will hit us, we can at least keep in our awareness the simple fact that it will. And at a more rapid pace than ever before in human history. Our work and personal lives will change—guaranteed—and we need to be ready with the appropriate attitudes and actions so that, like Al, we minimize the negative impacts and capitalize on the opportunities. When we are aware of change, we can see the signs earlier, so we're ahead of the wave. This gives us a distinct advantage in responding.
The Adaptability Advantage
“When the company I worked for merged with another,” said Miguel, “we suddenly had a new president. Up until then, ours had been run like a family-owned business—very casual—and people were kept on for years out of loyalty. This new person—who was very, very sharp, both in mind and in style—came in, and suddenly we were faced with demands of a very different corporate culture. We were held accountable for our quarterly bottom lines, and were expected to start showing up more at industry events to ‘fly the company flag.’ Those who saw the waves of change on the horizon in subtle elements like appearance adapted quickly. No more jeans, no more leggings, no more sneakers. Those that sharpened up were the ones that survived the merger. Those that didn't, like one guy who scoffed at the idea of having to wear a tie, got lost in the flood.”
CHANGE TRUTH #2
It's Not Personal
When I hear somebody sigh, “Life is hard,” I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”
—Sydney J. Harris
My phone rang. It was a well-known speaker and author asking to work with me. Let's call him Sam. “I've noticed over the last few years,” he said, “that things are changing. My speaking fees are beginning to go down and my book sales are, too. Fewer people are attending workshops. There are shifts happening, and I need to reposition myself in relationship to them to continue to make a living. Will you help me think that through?”
Instantly I said yes. Because Sam understood something crucial about change which will help him not waste time or precious emotional energy: it's not personal. He didn't blame himself for what was happening. He just observed it and realized he needed to respond in a new way.
What's happening right now to most of us is not because we're bad or wrong or incompetent. It's because the world is transforming at breakneck speed and each and every one of us must adapt to those changes as quickly and efficiently as possible. No one's exempt. Age doesn't get you off the hook (Sam is in his sixties, but you don't hear him complaining that he “should” be able to coast on his laurels until retirement). Nor does how hard you've worked until now, or what your expectations of your life have been. Or what you've sacrificed for or invested in. That's because what's going on has nothing to do with you personally!
Depersonalizing the change challenge you're facing gets you out of a sense of failure and frees up your thinking to be as adaptive as possible, like Sam. I remember the day I learned this. I went to hear Meg Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science. She's an expert at taking what is understood from the world of quantum physics and ecology and applying it to business. She's no flake—one of her major clients was the U.S. military. She was speaking about the fact that we're still stuck in a mechanistic model of the universe where we think we can make five-year plans for ourselves and our organizations, which is completely out of touch with the way living systems actually work. What I recall her saying was something like, “The way life happens is that things bump up against one another in an information-rich environment and change occurs. Some things thrive and others die out. Think of an aquarium with a bunch of fish. They're all doing fine. Then you put something different in there and it changes the whole ecosystem. Some fish survive, and others die as a result of the new input.”
At the time, I was struggling with the financial pressures of my book publishing company and sure I was doing something wrong. I probably was—but all my attention was focused on my “failure,” which wasn't helping me come up with new solutions. What Meg helped me do was see that I was just one of the little fish in a big aquarium whose ecosystem was changing.
Once I started viewing it that way, I was able to relate to the situation from a more objective and adaptive frame of mind. As I considered how to respond, it became clear that I wasn't interested in making the changes necessary to survive in the aquarium, and so I sold my company. Looking now from the outside at the publishing aquarium, I see even more clearly how what was going on really had nothing to do with me or my efforts.
If the aquarium image doesn't work for you, here's another technique for making the situation less personal. It's called self-distancing. It takes advantage of the brain's ability to make associated images (as if something's happening to you right now) and disassociated images (as if it's happening to someone else). Imagine you are watching a video starring someone else who is going through what you are right now. Give the person in the video a name and see him or her in the situation. Watch what's happening and ask yourself what could be going on that's beyond that person's control or influence. What's your advice for the person in the
