Its My Life Its Now Or Never

Its my life. I did it MY way.

change management,change managers,change management training

"Its my life
Its now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive
(It's my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just want to live while I'm alive
Its my life" [Bon Jovi]

Nothing lasts forever. This is the nature of things. It's how things are. Nobody has the perfect life.

We are all constantly impacted by change. Things manifest, are created and appear and then they decay, dissipate and disappear.

In my experience, most of us are deeply ambivalent about change. On the one hand we generally welcome new things appearing in our lives yet on the other hand we feel deeply threatened by change and it is the source of a great deal of stress, hassle and strain.

The tipping point is choice

Its my life - it's now or never

Change that I choose is welcome - but change that is imposed upon me is not welcome.

What does this imposed change mean to ME! What does this change mean to MY life, MY job, and MY financial security?

The way our minds work, we automatically create what we perceive to be MY life and it is usually all nicely packaged up with clear boundaries defining my own personal sense of who I am and how things are.

Another way of expressing this is to say that we all automatically develop our own unique inner map of reality shaped by our own personal early influences and from this we develop our own personal beliefs based on that map (largely unconsciously) to navigate us through life and primarily to keep us safe.

Its my life - the default setting

Functioning, as we do, in this way - things are seen as separate and largely static, our perception and general experience is that time proceeds in a linear manner from past to future, there is "me here" and the world "out there", and there are events and things that I don't like that happen to me.

This is our default setting – and so much of what we do is motivated by our deep inbuilt need to keep things as they are - to preserve the boundaries around "my life" - to preserve MY survival and MY safety and MY comfort.

So change – and especially imposed change - becomes something to be avoided and/or resisted, unless it’s on my terms and within my control.

This immediately creates a problem for most of us because we are now living through times of great turbulence and many of us are experiencing imposed change that seriously affects all areas of MY life.

The scale and pace of change that we are all experiencing is faster than our capacity to cope with it.

As Charles Darwin famously observed:

"It isn't the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change"

There are only three possible responses to imposed change:

(1) We can resist it, and increase our suffering;

(2) We can adapt to it; or

(3) We can accept it.

To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr:

We need the courage and the capacity to adapt to the imposed change when it is possible to DO something
We need to know how to stop resisting and to accept imposed change when it is NOT possible to do something
We need the insight to recognise the difference and to determine the most resourceful response

change management,change managers,change management training