Managing Change

Change can and must be managed.

Be it personal, social, political or economic change, we are all challenged to find ways to channel its forces so that we come out on top.

In our personal lives, some of us flow with changes while others resist or even ignore them.  

The smart ones succeed by getting out ahead of the changes that life brings.

How?

Firstly, knowing themselves as best they can. 

By understanding one’s abilities and limitations and by adopting a “can do” attitude to develop ways to enhance the first and mitigate the second. 

Indeed, many of us think a lot about how the world should change for us while many others think about how we can change ourselves. The growth of the self-help industry is testimony that we are learning that self-improvement is essential to successfully dealing with this rapidly changing environment. Constant learning allows us to adapt constantly. And our ability to adapt is key to managing personal change. 

Second, those who succeed at managing change regularly monitor and seek to understand their environment. They learn to manage their reactions in order to focus on the positive impact that changes may bring while seeking ways to limit their negative impact.

Knowing ourselves therefore requires a conscious investment of time and effort.

We must identify our priorities and what it will take to accomplish our goals.

Change is constant, and we must also be in constant motion in order to keep up with change or even stay ahead of the curve.

Stagnation is not an option, nor is procrastination.

As time and technology evolve, the pace of change is accelerating rapidly the velocity of which can paralyze whole societies. 

The pandemic exemplifies how quickly things can change. It has cast many personal and professional plans into the wind, and many of us face far different futures that those we faced little over a year ago.

How we react to change will of course determine our success in meeting and overcoming the challenges.

Attitude and reflection are key to managing change. Our attitude determines our commitment towards managing change, and reflection provides us with the inner calm with which to visualize our intentions and to make more thoughtful choices.

Knowledge and critical judgment can also be key to determining our strategies to manage change. Knowledge based on facts rather than the opinions of others can be essential for us to deal with change objectively. Finally, critical judgment can also be key if we are to evaluate the information that we need to process in order to adapt effectively.

This is also true about societal change, as each of us can play a role in the direction in which our society is headed.

We must equip ourselves to evaluate the ability of leaders to guide society towards a higher plane. We need to evaluate their promises with a degree of skepticism until they prove their worth. In other words, we should not only depend on their words but also on their actions.

We must also analyze their ability to consistently tell the truth and hold them accountable when they don’t.

Finally, we can all benefit by avoiding to blindly follow the herd and to take care to ensure that our actions and reactions reflect our own convictions.  

We will never be able to play a role in managing change if we simply surrender ourselves to the opinions and actions of others.

Worse yet, we might not survive as open societies if we place our futures in the hands of unscrupulous and manipulative leaders.

A knowledgeable person with a good amount of critical judgment is difficult to manipulate. 

We should all work hard to become that person.

Edición: Laura Espejo