Adapt and Adjust in Times of Change
SUMMARY
Do you find that the speed of change in today's world is a little bit hard to keep up with? Or are you easily able to adapt and adjust so that you can move through without all the stress and conflict?
Well, stick with me in this week's episode as I will continue our conversation around Self-Management by helping you Adapt and Adjust in Times of Change.
With the pace of change ever-increasing and no end in sight, individuals and teams must learn to become more agile. But here's the thing, many people are fearful of change. Because of that fear of change, they respond or indeed react in certain ways. The competency of Personal Agility is a vital tool for you to navigate change in a way that doesn't cause all that stress and conflict.
Personal agility is readily, willingly, rapidly, and effectively anticipating and adapting to change. So, it's not a case of being dragged along kicking and screaming. It's participating in the change and taking control. So, there are some key things that you need to change in your mindset and in your behaviors to make this happen.
The first is Change is Inevitable.
The second key principle to understand is that you need to Become Uncomfortable.
The third thing is to Focus on Why.
The fourth thing to understand is that it's all about Incremental Change.
Number five (and this is so vital for every one of us) is to Seek Support as you go through the change.
Well, that's it for me for another week.
Join me again next week as we continue looking at the competencies of Self-Management by becoming more intentional in our life and having a purposeful plan for where it is that we want to go.
Make sure that you Subscribe and hit the bell so that you won't miss out on next week's episode.
Join the conversation at grantherbert.com and sign up so that you get a notification every week. Share this on your social media and help get the message out. Because together, we can navigate change, we can become more emotionally intelligent, and we can enjoy the journey much more.
I'll see you then.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you find that the speed of change in today's world is a little bit hard to keep up with? Or are you easily able to adapt and adjust so that you can move through without all the stress and conflict?
Well, stick with me in this week's episode because I will show you how to become more Agile.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the year and Master Coach Trainer, and today I want to continue our conversation around Self-Management by helping you Adapt and Adjust in Times of Change.
With the pace of change ever-increasing and no end in sight, individuals and teams must learn to become more agile. But here's the thing, many people are fearful of change. Because of that fear of change, they respond or indeed react in certain ways. The competency of Personal Agility is a vital tool for you to navigate change in a way that doesn't cause all that stress and conflict.
A lot of people are resistors to change. They go, "No, I don't want to change." They become inflexible. And just like a muscle in a body, when you don't use it ( when you stay rigid), it becomes sore and creates pain.
The other thing is that you end up stagnating and going nowhere. So, you're stuck in the status quo and not moving forward into what you want to achieve in your life. But, it doesn't have to be that way. When you learn to embrace change or become the initiator of change, you can become more adaptable.
It's like the chameleon. The chameleon can go into any environment and quickly adapt to the color of the surroundings that keeps it safe from its predators and enables it to navigate and move through the environment where it's in without any problems.
That's what you can do when you learn these key skills in Personal Agility.
Instead of stagnating, you flow and grow and move towards the things that you want to achieve in life.
Whether or not this is for an individual or a collective of individuals working in a team, you must learn these skills.
Let me unpack with you what agility is and then look at some key principles to help you apply it.
Personal agility is readily, willingly, rapidly, and effectively anticipating and adapting to change. So, it's not a case of being dragged along kicking and screaming. It's participating in the change and taking control. So, there are some key things that you need to change in your mindset and in your behaviors to make this happen.
The first is Change is Inevitable.
Just like the larva becomes a butterfly, you go through the changes that are around you. So, whether or not you participate, the change still happens. Realizing that the change is inevitable instead of pushing back on change and hoping that change doesn't happen, you need to learn to roll with it.
As I said, the change will happen anyway, so you may as well enjoy the journey.
The second key principle to understand is that you need to Become Uncomfortable.
I know that's not something that you might want to do.
You may be thinking, "Grant, why would I want to become uncomfortable?"
You see, all the things that we have in our world today that help us navigate and move through life in a more effective and a lot easier way, came from people being uncomfortable with the current status quo.
So take the car for example.
Many years ago, to start an engine of a car, you needed to get in the front of it with a crank handle and turn it over and over against the compression of the pistons and the cylinder heads. It wasn't that easy, and eventually, what would happen is the magneto would be turning enough to create a spark. The compression, the fuel ignites the spark, and away it goes.
Unfortunately, though, what would happen often is it would kick back in the compression and damage your shoulder. Or you'd slip off the handle and grind your knuckles on the bare metal of the car.
So people had to get sick and tired of scraping their knuckles for them to create an internal combustion engine that started with an electric starter motor.
Where is it that you're uncomfortable right now?
What are you just allowing to happen- that could actually create a new pathway if you made some changes?
So, the second thing is you need to learn to be uncomfortable so that you can shift that status quo.
The third thing is to Focus on Why.
Focus on your reason for what it is that you are doing.
Focus on why the change would help you to get to that destination rather than detract from it.
Focus on your overall purpose and keep the big picture in view.
When changes happen, you often allow that to upset what's going on and, therefore, affect your physical and emotional state, rather than looking at it from the whole perspective. I talked to you about that over the last couple of weeks.
So, keeping focused on where you're going, rather than putting all your focus on the change, will help you to be able to put it into the right context - to move forward step-by-step, navigating each component of the change, so that you get to where it is that you are going.
The fourth thing to understand is that it's all about Incremental Change.
When you look at the change as being this big thing, it can create a lot of uneasiness and create a state in your brain that is overwhelming. By realizing that you didn't get to where you are now in one go- that you took a step-by-step process. Even in how tall you are, you didn't stop at that height; you incrementally grew year by year. By looking at a change in that way, by breaking it down into bite size chunks, each of those chunks seem a lot easier to navigate.
So, as you put yourself in the right mindset to look at the change, you can logically come up with a step-by-step process to move through towards the end goal.
Number five (and this is so vital for every one of us) is to Seek Support as you go through the change.
You are not designed to go through stuff on your own. There are people around you in our world that can help you to navigate change.
Particularly, if you're working on a change for a team, you are all individually putting your component in of that project, of that change, to therefore end up with a collective.
So, working with each other and looking at those strengths that others might have to compliment the strengths that you have, will help you to move through the change to be okay with saying:
"This is how I'm feeling about this change."
"These are the thought patterns that I'm going through."
"This is what I am worried might happen."
"These are the skills that I don't feel like I have."
To reach out and to be okay. Just like what I talked about last week: to ask others for their support, particularly when change is being given to you and not something that you are initiating.
You need to be okay with saying, "Okay, that's great. I need some more clarity on some of these things so that I can move forward with the change."
But it all starts with embracing the change- realizing that it's inevitable, that it's something that you are going to go through and you're going to come out the other side from. Then, look at the logical process that we need to go through to make that change work.
So they are the five key things that you can do to help you navigate change more effectively.
Change is going to happen, and more and more. Looking at change in a different light is the first and the largest step that we need to go through to make it painless and allow us to navigate and enjoy the journey.
Well, that's it for me for another week.
Join me again next week as we continue looking at the competencies of Self-Management by becoming more intentional in our life and having a purposeful plan for where it is that we want to go.
Make sure that you Subscribe and hit the bell so that you won't miss out on next week's episode.
Join the conversation at grantherbert.com and sign up so that you get a notification every week. Share this on your social media and help get the message out. Because together, we can navigate change, we can become more emotionally intelligent, and we can enjoy the journey much more.
I'll see you then.
