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    • Coping with Unwanted Change in Your Personal and Professional Life

    Coping with unwanted change isn’t something we only experience in our professional life. We are continuously dealing with change in our personal lives too. How we cope with unwanted change in either scenario can be reflected in the other.

    There is No Escape from Unwanted Change

    I’m not a winter person. Every year when the clocks go back and it gets dark in the evenings, I tell myself it’s fine. For the first couple of weeks, I pretend the change isn’t really happening. I continue spending as much time outside as I always did. I walk the dogs at the same time even though it’s getting darker. This is my protection against the sadness that dark evenings and cold weather bring for me.

    But here we are, four weeks after the clocks changed, and now it’s an inescapable reality. It is colder, it is darker, and the things I was doing are no longer fit the environment. If I carry on ignoring things and make no changes, I will become more uncomfortable.

    • My clothes aren’t warm enough.
    • I’m walking the dogs in the dark, tripping over bushes and trees.
    • I fell in a puddle yesterday because I haven’t got a torch.
    • The dogs haven’t got light-up collars on so it takes ages to find them.

    I am not a stupid person, so why has it taken me this long to recognise I need to make changes?

    Acceptance of Unwanted Change is Not Instant

    Partly it’s because I must accept that I’ll be doing things I don’t like doing. I don’t like getting up in the dark. I don’t like coming home from work in the dark. I don’t like having to go out again in the dark to the gym when I want to sit on the couch and watch TV.

    My natural urge is to hibernate but instead I need to keep going out, keep doing things. All this requires lots of mental energy. The change feels overwhelming because it’s not what I want. There’s so much I don’t like. That’s the same with any change that gets imposed on us.

    Creating the Energy for Accepting Change

    To accept unwanted change, you need to create the energy. There is a simple recipe for energy creation:

    Break the change into small steps = each small step requires less energy x achievement of each small step creates energy

    1. Break the change into small steps

    Find warm clothes – today I dug about in the back of my wardrobe until I found my stack of winter jumpers and coats

    I’ve looked at my schedule and reorganised my late afternoon meetings so I can fit in a dog walk while it’s still light.

    2. Don’t plan too far ahead

    I’ve used the natural break created by Christmas to make things feel smaller and more manageable. As I write this, it’s four weeks to Christmas, when I will have a holiday from work. This will give me time to recover from the mental energy of doing things I do not like and reorganise myself again for January and February. Before I know it, we’ll be into spring in March, and the clocks will be going forward.

    3. The Change Paradox

    This is a change that happens year on year, which makes me question why, even though I know it’s coming, I still don’t get ready for it. I still fight against it, even though it’s nature and inevitable.

    The lesson is that even when we know change is coming, if it’s something we really don’t like, we still deny that it’s going to happen to us. We still hang back and don’t volunteer to make things easier.

    But the agile mindset helps me:

    • breaking it down into tiny steps
    • finding small achievements and celebrating them, recognising when there’s going to be a break period like the Christmas holidays where things will be easier.
    • creating an environment around me that’s enjoyable – plenty of lights in the house, candles that smell nice to make the dark evenings more pleasant, blankets on the couch so when I do sit back and watch TV, I’m not cold.

    The Connection to Accepting Unwanted Change at Work

    All these tricks are driven by a brain-smart approach to change. My understanding of neuroscience for change at work helps me appreciate how important an agile change approach is. The two are interlinked. Breaking change into tiny steps, celebrating the achievement of every tiny step, having breakpoints to reflect on and celebrate what’s been achieved – all these things within the agile change roadmap are fundamentally brain-smart.

    To learn practical techniques to make change happen in your own life, join me for a 2-day feast of solutions and brain-smart hacks in the Agile Change Coach course.

    If you want to understand more about how our brains react to change, and how we can hack our brains from negativity to positivity, join me on my 2-day Neuroscience for Change course.