Handling Personal Change

Handling Personal Change

CHANGE ARTICLE 8

How do we ideal with changing environmental conditions. In this article, we focus on an individual response to situations demanding reform. The obstacles that can be mounted by people unwilling change (or in a change process) are all too familiar. But let us deal with the issues in relation to a positive adjustment to environmental change.

 

Change starts with deceleration and disengagement in one area followed by an attraction and participation in another. Successful personal change is handling the change process from deceleration to participation. This process will involve four clear stages embracing, accepting, accommodating and sustaining change. This process can also be likened to taking a curve or a corner. Decelerating into a corner, stopping (or turning), negotiating the bend (changing direction) and finally driving off confidently in a new direction.

 

How does one embrace changes? To embrace anything you must face it. Perhaps before you stretch out your arms around it, you probably need to be attracted to it or at least understand it enough to trust it, at least a little. From a business point of view, the changes you face will not require you to get physical, but they will make use of the same principles.

 

Facing change arouses fear and it will require courage to make a rational, if not balanced emotional, response to the whole concept of change. Allowing fear to run amok will result in maladjustment to that change. Facing the change is vital because you get an immediate visual of the situation at hand. But we cannot stop there. We must take initiative to get facts and information on the matter. Facts enable us to separate reality from rumor. Information enables us to take measures and qualified action in line with the facts of the situation. Reliable information also helps us develop a healthy amount of faith and confidence in the anticipated change, as we begin to understand its nature and intent. Embracing change assumes you want to remain proactive and maintain the initiative in the change process. If we don't maintain the initiative we will be overcome by the threat of change overcoming us.

 

Second, we must accept environmental change by doing something about it. That means that we should evaluate how the change will affect us and the demands it will make of us. In accepting change, we commit to address these demands first and then find out how to deliver later. This equation is not a comfortable one and many change initiatives are held back by people not willing to make this paradoxical pledge.

 

In helping people make a change, they must be assured that the transition will be safe and that the support means to do it will be provided. But having said that, there is always the element of risk and uncertainty that must be borne by us as individuals. Successfully negotiating this critical point on the curve or "taking the corner" is imperative to effective change. Those who refuse to take the corner are unlikely to come through with the change nor are they able to benefit from the opportunities that change brings. Face the change, make your acceptance speech and move on.

 

Third; work can now begin on accommodating the new change. This involves finding out how to do what is expected by; establishing new goals and identifying priorities, developing skills and structures to support the change in our environment This may mean adjusting daily routines, or reorganizing an office. In short, it is installing the capacity to handle change.

 

Sustaining change requires that we integrate changes with our other interests and harmonize their inclusion of those changes into our wider interests and functioning. This will help us to allow the change to become part of our normal activities thus reducing and eventually eliminating its initial threat. We will also need to develop problem solving capacity to overcome obstacles that we can expect along the way and learn to take advantage of opportunities opened up by the change.  Measure progress and make a point of celebrating achievement of targets however small.

 

Once we get used to handling this four-step process we can actually look forward to any constructive change. In the process we develop two valuable competencies; an ability to effectively navigate changes in the environment and the internal capacity to efficiently handle the change process.

 

Allan Bukusi, 2003