Change is a Constant

It seems obvious once it sinks in. The world is changing – all the time. Look at this graphic and how many people do assorted things in only 1 minute on the internet. This activity was almost entirely meaningless 25 years ago, yet now represents tens of millions of people doing things every minute of every day that were unheard of in 1995. Create your own observations to make the difference only 25 years can make, whether it is medicine, transportation, communication, entertainment, food supply (gluten-free, non GMO…), this change or evolution is ever-present.

We are changing – all the time. Have you noticed that how you spend your time now is different than 10 years ago? Do you have kids who’ve grown? Do you have health issues you didn’t use to have? Do you have attitudes that have changed? Of course, you do, we all do.

So then why do we so desperately seek to keep things the same? A few thoughts.

We as beings are wired to protect whatever it is we already have. Almost 100% of the time, any change is first viewed as a threat to what we already have. That makes the first hurdle in accepting change the response to the question “is this a threat to my current position”. Protect the status quo because it is working!!

Second, to create what we already have, we have made thousands upon thousands of what we think are better choices along the way. Change as a concept is to throw in a new variable which may have an effect on what we have already intellectually owned as a “best choice”. Under those circumstances, which are most, considering change asks us to accept that the choice our earlier self-made may not have been as well considered as well as we thought. Protect the proof of intellectual strength, otherwise, it wasn’t very smart!!

To consider change then is to absolutely rock two pillars that hold up our lives – the status quo because it is working and the smartness of our past choices. Who wants to continually embrace perceived threats or admit we could have been smarter?

There is an iceberg sized variable that people fail to consider in this comfort zone. That iceberg is very simply that we created the status quo that was suited “at that time and under those circumstances”. If you chose to add “at this time and under these circumstances” to every consideration, you will completely change your observation of both the status quo and the smartness of past decisions.

Forgive yourself if you don’t do this all the time. At that time and under those circumstances, you had not considered how change might have been a friend. Change encourages the variables that push discomfort forward. How you discipline a 6-year-old is not how you discipline a teenager. How you chose a car in 2005 is not how you choose your car today. Entirely let go of the “status quo” simply because that is how you did it to this point. The status quo of 1920 was the first time women were voting, only 7 million vehicles were on American roads, only a third of American homes had electricity, radio was just beginning and we used X-rays to measure people’s feet for shoe size.

How your business or life got to where it is has everything to do with what you have prepared your business or yourself to be able to do with the options tomorrow, not yesterday or even today. When you want different options, choose so and take action accordingly. For choosing of the options, you want a strategy. And, not remarkably, a strategy is what is also created at a moment in time, under those circumstances. It too must change to remain forward-looking. A strategy that can evolve as needed or wanted is at the core of all success. It is the essence of purpose. Without it, there is no navigation toward something, only reaction to circumstances.

It’s all your choice, Navigate a course or React to circumstances. Either way, it’s all change, because we all exist on a planet in motion, in a galaxy in motion in a universe in motion. It has always seemed to me that trying to stand still in that reality is an exercise in futility.