The Art of Change

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

C.S. Lewis

We have a tendency to resist change. We find what is working and stick with it. But why? The world and how it revolves, is in constant flux. Why aren’t we? We find that a Facebook fan page is working incredibly well to market our new enterprise and stop there. Will a fan page sustain our business ten years from now? We need to constantly re-evaluate how we are presenting ourselves in the net if we wish to stay competitive. These re-evaluations, these changes, can be incredibly painful, or they can be an incredible, life changing experience.

• Stop the inertia. Inertia is defined as: The tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest until met by an opposite equal or greater force, and a body in motion to keep moving until met by an opposite equal or greater force. Making drastic changes to your personal inertia is not only difficult but hard to sustain. Changing, or stopping, your inertia can be best achieved through small changes. These small changes are easy to keep in motion, and over time, compound.
• Overcome the inertia of others. This can be tougher than changing your own inertia. You will meet resistance, you will feel the negativity. How do we change the mind that is set? Ask their opinions. Show them the pay-off. Stay motivated. When people see the good that is coming from the changes, they will get on board.
• Celebrate the small wins. We naturally want things to happen now. They simply don’t. Along the way we can get discouraged because we are not at the point we want to be at. Remember where you started at, and see how much you have accomplished. You may not be where you want to be, but you are probably where you are supposed to be.
• Make change a part of your life. One of the biggest things I learned in the military was, Adapt and Overcome. I have been out of the service for 20 years now and I still hear that phrase almost every day. Find those catalysts for change. Find your joy and stick with it. We can do things we hate, but not for long. Find the joys in re-evaluation. You will get answers to questions you haven’t even asked yet. Once we start down the road of constant flux we cannot help but adapt and overcome any situation.
• Fail. Change means we open ourselves to failure. That’s ok. Sustainable success will not happen if we are unwilling to fail. Find joy in every attempt, in every victory, in every failure, and the change will be a reward in itself.

Success isn’t permanent, and failure isn’t fatal.

Mike Ditka