“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” –Viktor Frankl
For some, change is a scary word and an even scarier event. Yet, we live in a world that is changing faster than most of us can absorb.
In the 1980’s, I remember asking my 60-something mother how she dealt with the amount of change that had happened in her lifetime. Imagine what she’d seen – she was born in 1915. In the 1920’s her father was one of the first people to buy a car, driving it home, honking to alert the family, then realizing he didn’t know how to stop and turn the car off. So, around and around the block he went. By comparison, when she died in 1985, LBJ was a 6-lane super highway. It was a long time since the dirt roads in the Rockwall of her childhood.
Her response?
“It happens so gradually that it doesn’t seem that significant.” Had she gone from childhood to retirement in a couple of years, it might have been more than she could handle.
And many of us handle the gradual, almost unseen change well.
But a lot of the change isn’t slow!
Buckminster Fuller first noticed that prior 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple because different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
The point is this – you cannot avoid change. And if you are a person who hates change, you are setting yourself up for some unhappy times.
So, what are you to do?
Move from tolerating or resisting it to embracing it!
[Note: Ann Ranson is one of our GGN members… we thank her for writing this article for our blog!]