How we react to change

I realised I needed to talk about change in this podcast before I take about the future in the next podcast. Change is such an important thing in life and our ability to reposed correctly to changing circumstances is so important to our success as individuals. This podcast talks through what we tend to do in times of high stress and change and what we can do to reposed better in the future.

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Transcript

Welcome! Today, I want to talk about change. I produced this on a video as an experiment a month or so ago before i settled on podcasting as the preferred method of producing these sessions. I am going to release a podcast on the future and what i think it holds in the next few days, but it occurred to me that perhaps a quick podcast on change would probably be a good idea before we got to the future as it is integral to how we need to respond to the future going forward. So I thought I would slip this one in as a precursor to the next podcast. 

It’s interesting because there seams to be a bit of theme going on at the moment based on feedback and what I am inclined to talk about. This is the thing I find fascinating about the creative process - you start off with a clear plan of what you think you are going to do and then it all seems to morph into something else completely - its not bad or worse it’s just different and whatsmore it seems to work better than the original idea. I guess there’s a lesson ion there somewhere on change already!

So back to the topic at hand:

We probably regard ourselves as fairly capable of dealing with change. After all, most of our lives have been dominated by change. Ever since we were born, we have had to deal with different things in our lives. We've had to deal with the challenges we've had to deal with growing up. So generally speaking, we're probably quite good at change. However, we seem to be pretty bad at responding to change. We don't like change, we resist it. It gets in the way of things it affects our routines. It's unpredictable. It's at these times of great change when we realise how much of our lives are dictated by routines. We like routines. In fact, there's a very large industry out there in the world, teaching us to implement routines. So you will no doubt have heard of the 21 days to create a new habit. Habits are meant to be good things. This is what the productivity industry would tell you. So, if you want to become healthier or fitter, you need to do nothing more than get up at 5 am every morning and run five kilometres, and in 21 days, it will be a habit. As you can see, we're programmed therefore to implement routines in our lives. So it's no surprise, really, when we find ourselves upset, angry and distressed, because of a situation where we're being forced to change.

Change is a fascinating subject; it talks to the heart of human psychology, it goes back to the dawn of time. In essence, one of the first things that we do, as humans, when faced with large scale changes, is freeze. We freeze for a number of reasons. One is self-preservation. If you were out in the mountains or on the plains of Africa, and you heard a lion roar, freezing is probably a fairly good preservation technique, as no movement doesn't catch the eye of the predator. And you're less likely to be prey. It doesn't always work, of course, because if the herd charges off over the horizon, and you're still standing there, the lion gets a free meal. So it's not foolproof. But it is something that we do. 

A story that comes to mind, which highlights this, it was a story of one of the survivors of a ship disaster, the herald of free enterprise. This was all a very long time ago. It was very shocking when it happened. It was shocking for a number of reasons. But it was shocking how quickly it happened. It took about 90 seconds for the ship to turn over. 193 people, I believe, were killed. But one of the interesting things that I remembered from all of the analysis after the event was a story of a gentleman who was drinking in the bar when the ship initially listed. He was from the armed forces. Immediately, he realised something bad was happening because a ship shouldn't list that steeply. So he got out of the bar as quickly as he could onto the deck. And I don't know how he did it, but he survived as a result of that. But in the interviews afterwards, when he gave his story, it was his observation of the behaviour of other people at the bar, which was most interesting. He said virtually everyone froze where they were, or held on to something, they didn't move. And on further analysis, it seems not just here in the Herald-of-free-enterprise, but in many situations when we've had terrorist attacks on buildings or we've had aeroplane crashes or any other sort of major traumatic change events, which is sudden, we find that people tend to freeze. There are a number of reasons for that. Some of it is, it's just too much information for our brains to process. We overload our brains. As a result, we are incapable of thinking. Therefore, we don't tell our brains to do anything. Another thing is that we have this inbuilt response, which is the freeze which we have to overcome. The reality is that change comes suddenly, and if you don't know what the next steps are, it's very hard to do anything to get yourself out of that situation. So we know that we're not terribly good at dealing with change, we know that on the whole, we like routines. We can also see that, as young children, our brains are imaginative, malleable, able to take on lots of information – experimental. Children are generally very good at coping with change, but as we get older, and we get more established, and we have more routines in our life, we get less flexible and less able to change quickly. Probably the best example of this is if you look at 80-year-olds, who have really, by this stage, pretty much decided how they want to live their life and have been in some sort of routine for a long time. So their ability to take on lots of new information quickly and respond to it is reduced. So we can see that as we get older, it gets harder to change. We also have the benefits of a great deal more experience. So anything that changes means that we have to go back throughout our entire lives and throw this current situation in which we find ourselves, against everything we already know, to see if there's something similar. A young person doesn't have that historical database to go back to, so is more likely to look forward. So there, you can already see, there are a lot of things affecting how people deal with change. 

The first step that we take normally as humans is, we deny the change. So the first thing we do is we either ignore it, or we just simply say it's not possible, it's not going to affect me, and I don't need to pay any attention.  That's normally the time when the most damage is done. We should always pay attention to change, we should never deny change. Denial just gives the changing situation more time to affect us. It means that we are further behind the curve from the get-go. The next step that we normally go through is one of shock; that is, the shock of when we suddenly realise after we've denied it’s existence, for however long the change is taking place, we suddenly realise that it has affected us or it is going to affect us, or it is actually affecting us. And that's quite shocking. We generally don't respond too well to that. This is the bunny in the headlights situation, that’s two things straight off the bat, that we shouldn't do, but we almost always do. 

Whether we like it or not, the next step is that we go through a period of fear, fear of the unknown, fear of the change, fear of the effect is going to have on us. Fear on the whole is actually totally irrational and it can manifest itself in so many different ways; You can worry about yourself, you can worry about other people, you can worry about what's going to happen in the future. It's almost boundless fear, it's such an appalling facet, such an appalling feeling. It can make you sick, and so many people live their lives in fear. And one of the key things that we should all do is to try and manage and overcome fear. Entering a change situation and being fearful means that you don't do the things that you're meant to do, things become very hard to do. If you're worried about something or you're fearful about what will happen if you take a step, or you move or you change, then you're less likely to make that move and change.

Then something starts to happen, you get angry, you get angry with yourself because you haven't made the change and you get angry because you realise you've wasted a lot of time. You get angry with other people, because you think they have made you change, or that they are responsible. You blame others, you blame them because you think they're responsible for your fear,  they are responsible for making you have to change. They're responsible for all the things that are going to happen to you, which you're not sure about, and you worry about. So you've gone from fearful to angry, you're frustrated, as a result of this. You're frustrated because you can't see a way forward, you're frustrated because you don't know how to respond effectively to this new situation. But you know, you have to change, you now know you have to change, you now know you're late, because you wasted a lot of time. To begin with, you're angry with yourself, you're angry with others, and you don't know what the first steps are. So it's just this pent up frustration that's building up in you, and you want to do something, but you just don't know what to do.

It's at this stage, normally that creativity kicks in, you start to become imaginative, you try to solve the problem, you try to solve any part of the problem, you just need to find a way forward and your brain kicks in and starts to give you ideas and you copy ideas off other people. You look around you. You start to investigate, you start to take things that you've seen and apply them. And generally, this is a very proactive and positive step forward. It's the first proactive step that you've really taken since you first denied the change. And to be honest, the time it can take you from first denying to getting to this creativity point can really be anything between six and 12 months. 

It can be longer, in 2007, when we had possibly the largest financial crash worldwide, in my lifetime anyway. It took me four years to get to a point where I knew what I needed to do, or I was creative, and I accepted the situation, and i could step forward. I had to destroy my old business that I'd spent 10 years building, I had to give up everything that I had, I had to mourn the death of my business. And then I had to do something about it, I had to go and move into new space, I had to find a new slot for myself, which wasn't with the benefit of all the skills and expertise that I had in the business at the time because my guys had gone, I was on my own. So you can imagine the fear, the anger, the desperation, it was all there. It took me almost four years to get my head around all of that. Four years is an extraordinary amount of time, an enormous amount of time that I wasted when in fact, you know, looking back retrospectively now, I should have been doing something a lot sooner. The next crisis that came along was Brexit, and everything seized up again. All my clients, they stopped for a year, nothing happened. I had to find another way to reinvent myself and do something different. Find another skill set, another thing that was required, in order for me to survive. It took me about a year that time to re-pivot as a business. More recently with COVID we've had a global crisis, which has changed everything again, and  I'm happy to say this time that having learned the lessons I have learned in the past it took me about a month to realise I needed to move. I needed to do something, I needed to get creative and I needed to move into new space. 

So as you can see, you can move through this curve quicker with practice, and with understanding about what's going on. So with this creativity that you've generated and you're generating your ideas comes a level of acceptance, psychologically you are, by going through this process accepting the need to change, you're accepting that your environment has changed, your situation has changed, and that you need to change. Acceptance is a liberating feeling because all that fear and anger, all that denial, all that blame, it goes, once you accept the situation, in its entirety. So acceptance is a huge step forward, it's how you make peace, with the change, if you like. Now, as a result of accepting this and having some ideas about how you need to change, you start to develop a spirit of hope. You can see light at the end of the tunnel, you can imagine what it might be like, it's not all doom and gloom. So you move forward as a result. And as you take those first steps, and you have some success, and you realise that what you're doing are the right things, you get enthusiastic about the change, and you invest more time in it, you get more creative because the stress has gone. And as a result, you get more successful.  A this stage of the game, you have more or less gone through the change cycle. 

The challenge for us is to learn how to do it quicker. How do we overcome the initial denial? How do we unfreeze ourselves? And how do we move to acceptance and creativity as quickly as possible? So the first step is that we have to understand ourselves, we have to understand how we react to change how we can get paralysed by change, then we need to do some sort of investigation, we need to learn about the situation, we need to educate ourselves, we need to understand how serious the changes are and how big the impact potentially is going to be. So there's an investigation process, we have got to go out, collect information, look at it in an unemotional way, understand how it's affecting us. And then we need to try and formulate a plan to go forward. That is a really difficult thing to do. One of the core things that we're taught in Western society is a thought process called Newtonian reductionism. And you will have been taught this, from the moment you first went to school. And the idea very simply is that if you collect all the data, and you crunch all the numbers, you will eventually arrive at the truth. This is false. There are many truths. And most of the time, when you crunch all the data, and you get to an answer. It's, at best the temporary answer. It's not complete. It's normally missing large amounts of information. And if you act on it, you'll only find later on that it was incomplete. So a better way of doing it is to adopt the Eastern philosophy, which really accepts that there are many truths. And we just need to pick one. We just need to pick a truth. And we need to act on it. So in a situation where we've got change,  and we've got all this information, and we don't know what to do. Pick a truth. Assume something. Say I think that in six months time, the world is going to look like this. Therefore I'm going to formulate a plan to deal with that situation. Now what then happens is that you then have next-steps. We have something that you can action. It's something that you can do. So you can go forward, you can become creative, you can adapt. 

Now, what happens straightaway, the moment you move, is you learn something new, you learn that what you assumed when you were in the frozen state is no longer true. You couldn't see what you can now see, but because you've moved and you've changed perspective, your context has changed. You can now see things differently.  Therefore, that allows you to go back and re-evaluate the truth that you assumed and what your next steps were. And what tends to happen is, you get more accurate in your response, as you re evaluate and move forward. So the very act of moving forward on an assumption is much more useful to you, in making your response accurate to the future requirements, that the change is imposing on you. This is a huge thing for us in the West to overcome, we have to be able to just say, let's assume a truth, let's assume a way forward, and let's change on the way and get more accurate. Let's assume that we might never know what the truth is, because I mean, if the truth perceptually is changing as we move forward, then it's fairly safe to say that there isn't any one truth. Truth is relative, truth is relative to your situation. So the context you find yourself in and the world around you, once we understand that there is no real truth, and we understand that we need to move, it gets easier. So understanding that we're going to freeze, we're going to get denial, we're going to get anger, we're going to get frustration, we're going to blame people, we just park all of that immediately. We say, what do we think is going to happen? Well, let's assume this is going to happen. Let's move forward. 

Now, going back to the story of the Herald of  free enterprise, this gentleman who was in the armed forces, it reminds me of another friend of mine who was in the paratroopers; one of his favourite expressions, which he was taught in the paratroopers by his Sergeant Major when under fire was ”keep low, and move fast and keep moving forward”. What a wonderful piece of advice. So in a situation where people are trying to kill you, bombs are going off, you're getting blown up, you're under fire. It's an ambush, you didn't expect it. The one piece of advice for all of those man is keep low, move fast, keep moving forward. And that is what we need to do in change.

 Hopefully, with this episode today, you understand a little bit about how we respond psychologically to change. We have some tools now that we can employ. And we have an attitude and approach to change, which allows us to move forward quicker, think of how many times you didn't change fast enough and how much time you wasted as a result of that. How much opportunity there was available to you had you moved faster.  That is what this is all about. It's about understanding ourselves understanding how we respond to change, and creating a more accurate and proactive response from ourselves in life. If we can do that, in times of great change, then we automatically become leaders. Because as we know, about 75% of the population freeze, or completely go to pieces in those sorts of situations. So it's a really, really important characteristic that we need to train ourselves in. In order to be become effective leaders and effective in ourselves in our lives. I'll leave you with that. 

Email me your thoughts. your emails are really important. The more feedback I get, the more imaginative my brain gets, the more you actually pull out of my head, and the more connections I make, and really they will make these videos a lot more interesting. And if I get a lot of the same sorts of questions coming back from people then I will probably put a video together to talk specifically to some of those elements.