In this episode, I share my 3-step process for succeeding in changing times. The process has one foundation principle: responsibility. You must take responsibility for what happens to you, no matter what (even when it's not your fault).
Look, we're in unprecedented times. Businesses are changing. Industries are changing. The extent to which you recognize change, then take responsibility for what you can do -- that will effect your success and your ability to thrive. Rather than see yourself as a victim, or look to blame someone else, ask yourself "What can I do about this?"
What I share in the episode isn't just theoretical. I talk about my own personal journey this year, where I faced the prospect of closing a business I'd had for seven years, and starting something new and unproven, completely from scratch.
More On Thor
On Instagram: @thorchallgren
On Facebook: Facebook.com/coursechangepodcast
Win Your Week 7-Day Guide Free Download!
Thanks for listening!
In this episode, I share my 3-step process for succeeding in changing times. The process has one foundation principle: responsibility. You must take responsibility for what happens to you, no matter what (even when it's not your fault).
Look, we're in unprecedented times. Businesses are changing. Industries are changing. The extent to which you recognize change, then take responsibility for what you can do -- that will effect your success and your ability to thrive. Rather than see yourself as a victim, or look to blame someone else, ask yourself "What can I do about this?"
What I share in the episode isn't just theoretical. I talk about my own personal journey this year, where I faced the prospect of closing a business I'd had for seven years, and starting something new and unproven, completely from scratch.
More On Thor
On Instagram: @thorchallgren
On Facebook: Facebook.com/coursechangepodcast
Win Your Week 7-Day Guide Free Download!
Thanks for listening!
Thor Challgren 00:04
Welcome to the Course Change podcast. My name is Thor Challgren. Every week I love sharing with you stories of people who have made a dramatic career change. We talked about the challenges they faced, the lessons they learned and the success they found on their own unique journey. Over the course of my own life, I've worked in multiple industries, from startups to corporations, the common factor in my work experience: the ability to adapt to change. If you're looking for insights and inspiration to thrive during change, you'll be glad you listened.
Thor Challgren 00:42
Alright, today on the show, my guest is me. Yes today, it is an episode where I am going to give you my thoughts on something that matters to me. Of course, when you're hearing interviews where I'm talking about the people, that matters to me as well. But today, I really get to go in depth into one topic that I find meaningful.
Thor Challgren 01:06
Today, what I want to do is talk about the idea of change as it relates to us and what we can do to adapt and deal with change. And for me, that comes down to responsibility. So that's the theme for today's episode. And what I'm going to do is share with you what I believe are three strategies that you can employ, and it relates to responsibility and how to deal with change. So dealing with change by taking responsibility.
Thor Challgren 01:39
I'm going to tell you a little bit later my story of how I got into producing this podcast and it deals with change. Why does change matter? I mean, obviously, we're going through times now where businesses are changing, entire industries are changing. People have jobs where they're changing. Many of us are working from home that used to be in offices. Businesses that we used to think of as something that would always be there, they are now changing. You have malls, you have shopping centers, places, movie theaters that we used to go to, and you could just never have conceived of that being something that wouldn't always be there. Well, now we're finding that there is literally nothing that is immune to this idea of change. And how we respond to that change is really going to define our lives. And that's why that idea of responsibility is so impactful to me.
Thor Challgren 02:41
I remember years ago, hearing someone give a piece of business advice, where they said, you always want to be thinking of ways to essentially put yourself out of business. I think there used to be departments within companies where their job was to look at what the company did and figure out how could we put ourselves out of business. Well guess what, right now, a lot of us are finding, we don't have to have departments to put ourselves out of business. Because all around us things are changing and the economy is doing that, circumstances are doing that. So being able to be proactive in advance? More meaningful than ever.
Thor Challgren 03:19
Responsibility is such a key factor. In almost any book that you read on personal development, on business, it is one of the touchstone ideas. I remember a couple of years ago reading Jack Canfield's book, "The Success Principles," chapter number one in that book is called "Take 100% Responsibility For Your Life." It is the foundational principle in his entire book and without it, there's nothing else that comes after it. He talks about a formula: event plus response equals outcome. So the event plus your response equals the outcome you're going to get. I think Tony Robbins also talks about that. When you look at that, what you're really saying is the event or whatever happens plus how you respond to it is going to equal the outcome that you get. So if you are looking at what's going on in the world right now, with COVID-19, and the way that it's affected people's lives, their businesses, that's the event. Then there is your response. So how do you respond to that? How do you view that? What actions do you take? How do you adapt? How do you adjust? That's your response. So the event plus the response equals the outcome you're going to get.
Thor Challgren 04:34
So if you take someone who looks at that circumstance, and just says, Wow, there's nothing I can do, you know, we're really screwed with this. And they take that sort of attitude. They're essentially not taking responsibility. I mean, they are, but they're abdicating it. And so that is the outcome they're going to get. They're going to get a less desirable outcome. He says, and I think this is so worth underlining, "You have control over three things. The thoughts you think, the images you visualize and the actions you take." Let me repeat those real quick, the thoughts you think, the images you visualize and the actions you take. So basically, that's your response. You can respond by the things that you think about, the things that you decide you're going to do. You can respond with the images that you visualize. In other words, do you visualize something better coming out of this or do you visualize something worse coming out of this? And then finally, the actions you take and that's the bottom line is what is your response action-wise? How are you going to move forward on this.
Thor Challgren 05:35
In addition to Jack Canfield, also read in Grant Cardone's book "The 10X Rule." One of the foundational principles for him, same way -- take responsibility for every little thing in your life. He has an interesting way of looking at that, too. When you read some of the examples that he gives, they could at first seem extreme. He gives an example of- let's say you get into a car crash and someone hits you. So clearly, it's their fault. He will go and say that even though it's their fault, and they are the ones that hit you, ultimately you are responsible. I remember the first time I read that I was a little bit skeptical, like, wait, that person hit me, how could I be responsible? His point is there are so many things that you could have done differently so that you didn't get hit. You could have left earlier, you could have left later, you could have had someone drive you, you could have been so successful that if you were on your way to a sales appointment, that the client would come to see you. His point is that if you default to: it was somebody else's fault, you are not looking for ways that you could improve your own situation. You're not looking for ways to take responsibility.
Thor Challgren 06:47
And a corollary to taking responsibility is complaining. When we complain about things, we're saying some version of I'm not responsible for the problem. There's nothing I can do about it. We're saying we don't have the power to change and essentially you are giving away your power to choose something different. Years ago, I wore one of those wristbands, I think it was a stop complaining group. And the point of it was to remind you not to complain. And the idea was that every time you caught yourself complaining about anything, you would have to take the wristband off one wrist and move it on to another. And your goal was to get to keeping it in place for 21 days. This was really hard. I remember the first couple of times it was difficult, and you start to get a definition in your mind of what is a complaint. For me, I started to make a little adjustment that worked for me, which was something like this. If I found myself on the highway and someone cut me off and for a second, maybe I complained about that, I didn't consider it a complaint as long as I immediately would say to myself, here's what I'll do different next time. So even there, rather than complaining, I was being proactive and deciding what can I do differently than I've done before to take responsibility for that problem.
Thor Challgren 08:08
Another kind of complaint that we can find ourselves making, and this is something I feel like I used to do a lot more, I try not to now, is you take responsibility, but you do it in a sarcastic way. Like you might say something like, "Well, like, I guess it's my fault that such and such happened." And really what you're saying, It's not my fault, but I know that's what you want me to say. So my point with that is if you don't feel genuine in taking responsibility for something, you're not. And it's the energy of it is not going to be helpful to you. So look at that. And if there are places where you say that you are responsible for something, but you're being sarcastic or ironic about it, then ask yourself, is that really helpful to you?
Thor Challgren 08:53
So I mentioned that I want to talk about three strategies for dealing with change and they have to do with responsibility and you are taking responsibility for your circumstances. So in this time that we're in, as I said, there's a lot of change. Industry is changing, businesses are changing. So the ways that you can address that are asking yourself three questions. What do people need? What can I do about it? And how soon can I do it?
Thor Challgren 09:19
So let me go through each of those one at a time. What do people need? Look around and see what industries are being affected. This is probably for most of us pretty easy to see. Before I began producing this podcast, I had a career in the travel industry for seven years. That obviously was affected in a huge way. At the beginning of this year, I still had many clients that were booked for travel throughout 2020. Well, guess what? Those people are not traveling now. And that totally makes sense. But there is an industry that was hugely affected. I could see that early on in February that this was going to be possibility. And so I started to make some changes. And I'll talk about that in a second.
Thor Challgren 10:03
So you want to look at what's been affected and I'll give you another example. There's a local business in my town that does healthy food, they do smoothies, they do bowls, it's great, healthy food for you. One of the things that they did when restaurants had to close down, the state said, Well, if you're a restaurant, you can also sell groceries. So this business started to offer grocery delivery service for their clients. So there was something where they looked at it and said, All right, our industry is being affected. But here's a way that we can provide an additional service because people weren't able to go to the grocery store, or maybe they had a concern about it. So this business was delivering groceries. So there's a great way where you can adapt to it.
Thor Challgren 10:48
You can also ask what new needs are out there. I remember early on, this was probably in March, I was out for a walk in our neighborhood. And I went by someone's house where they had a whole series of signs up in front of the house. And you've probably seen these sort of, you know, "Congratulations, You Had a Baby" sign. But this was like that on steroids. You could tell that from the signs that someone in the house was having their 18th birthday. The signage in here celebrated their birthday was a huge thing. I don't know this, but I'm surmising that that person would have had a party to celebrate their birthday. But obviously, when you can't have friends over, we're distancing and all that, they couldn't do that. So their family instead did this. And I remember looking at this business had a little sign that had their contact info, their email, their phone number, and I think it was Card My Yard or something like that. And I remember thinking there is a business that has the potential to completely change how they do business. Maybe this family wouldn't have hired them before, but now they are. So there's someone who looked at the circumstances and said our industry is affected in a potentially good way, there's something that we can do that we weren't able to do before. So not only are you looking at what industries are affected in a bad way, but where are the opportunities that maybe didn't exist before?
Thor Challgren 12:12
And that goes to my point number two, which is what can I do about it? Ask yourself, what skills do you have? What does your business already know or do well? What interests do you have? And how can you provide something here? I heard a story recently without going into the details of it of a business where their entire business was doing one thing. And now in this economy, that thing was no longer needed. They probably could have said, what are we going to do? This is terrible, you know, may have to close up shop. Instead, they were proactive and said, what else do we know? They had contacts with civic people where they were able to go out and say, Well, what do you need now? You need signs that we can provide. So they went out and did something about it. So look at what you do, what skills do you already have? What are you good at? What do you like? What assets do you have? And that could be relationships, where you could go to someone and say, Hey, I know you now have a need for this thing. We can help you with that. You ask yourself, what can I do about it?
Thor Challgren 13:17
And finally, you want to ask how soon can you do it? And honestly, now would be a good time. I spoke earlier about my story of my podcast. And it was an interesting year for me, as for many people, I'm sure. At the beginning of the year, I had this plan in mind where I was going to slowly begin this podcast and I was going to do it over the course of the entire year. While I was in the process of transitioning out of the day to day process of managing my travel agency. That was the plan at the beginning of the year. In February, March, it started to become apparent to me that circumstances were going to change pretty quickly and so I know made a decision.
Thor Challgren 14:01
Which was, you know what, there is no time like the present, I could see on the horizon that travel was going to be greatly affected. And I made the decision to pivot 100% into the podcast and to the things that I wanted to do. And that had been longer term things. But I said, I'm going to do them now. That for me is an example of looking at the landscape and seeing where the opportunities are, and then jumping in. You could sit there and go, Well, I don't know I should give it some more thought, maybe this isn't the right time. And you could be in a place where I could have blamed other people and I could have wallowed and thinking about, gosh, you know, I have seven years invested in this career in this business, but I didn't do that. I mean, yes, I was a little bit bummed about it. And I spent a short amount of time lamenting that loss, but then I moved on. And I think that is the fundamental thing that people who are going to be successful adapting to change is they quickly pivot to the thing that's next. They jump all in and they do these three things. They ask, what do people need? they ask, What can I do about it? And then they say, How soon can I do it?
Thor Challgren 15:13
I hope you've been enjoying the podcast so far. If you have and you haven't yet subscribed, please consider hitting subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. We're pretty much on every platform. So look for that place where you can subscribe, that way every new episode will be available to you the minute it drops.
Thor Challgren 15:30
The schedule for the podcast is that on Tuesdays, I'm going to have an interview episode where I talk with someone about their own story of change, how they are dealing with it, adapting to it, and what we can learn from their experience. And then on Friday, it'll be an episode where it's just me. So Tuesday and Friday, but please do consider subscribing. And if you like the podcast and you want to help me build the community, please consider giving me a five star review on Apple podcasts. It will help build the community of people who are helping each other address and deal with change. So thank you very much for listening again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
Thor Challgren 16:13
All right, thanks for listening to the Course Change podcast. If you liked this episode, I would be incredibly grateful to you if you jump over to iTunes and leave me a five star written review. This one simple act will help others find the show and build a community of people who support each other. You can always find me on Instagram @ThorChallgren. Send me a DM and let me know what you thought. Thanks again for listening and until next time, Namaste.