Adapt or die. Well maybe that is a bit dramatic for a rainy autumn day but we only have to look back through history both in terms of humanity, the animal world and nature to see that this is true. This week the last coal mine in England closed and the Port Talbot steelworks was shut down. Thousands of people are having to rethink their lives in major ways.
On a more prosaic level, thousands of school children are attending a new school, where there will be new teachers, potential new friends, a new environment. How many of them have been encouraged to stop and think “who do you want to be at this next stage of your life?” or “what do you want to have experienced in these next years alongside exams?”. Most of the time we just blindly walk into the next challenging situation without taking even a short time out for that reflection.
Yet change, and its challenges, are part of our daily lives. Once we have withstood the ups and downs of school we move on to college, university, work and the adult life. We have to let go of childish ways and learn how to take responsibility, to juggle work, finance, mortgages, relationships, marriage. In my own experience becoming a parent is the most transformative moment of most people’s lives – the enormous responsibility we take on for a child’s life and wellbeing, the joys and heartaches of watching them grow up. And then they leave us to go to university or into work and it is both a proud yet terrifying moment – “oh help, who am I going to be now?”!
Entering work and moving up into new roles, managing and leading others, often with little training, possibly being made redundant, moving to a new environment, all this requires flexibility. Even in today’s world many are under-supported in managing these transitions successfully and confidently. And don’t get me on the subject of old age, retirement and all its challenges! I have learnt that if we set a goal, our mind works to bring to notice the actions that will help us attain it. Despite being 74 I still have a vision board in my kitchen and I watch with admiration people many years older than me composing music, painting pictures, writing books and forging new adventures of all kinds.
So, thinking about all this, I wrote a book, The Change Wizard, now available on Kindle and Amazon, with the now, very sadly, late Richard Israel, with whom I also wrote my first book Your Mind at Work: Self-Knowledge for Business Success. In our mid-fifties when we wrote both books, and working in the coaching arena with people in many different fields and walks of life, we observed how little time people gave to considering their sense of themselves within these transitional moments.
As companies focus on results and don’t always have the budget for developing staff, we decided to offer an in-depth manual for personal change. This is not organisational change. It is about you, your life, your values, your dreams, options and choices, decisions and actions. It is about your relationships with partners, joys and possible difficulties, divorce, bereavement and it is all about how to adapt to what is and yet look constantly towards and envision a positive future and “be prepared”.
We have created this as a Seven Step process that you could undertake giving it a few minutes over seven days, seven weeks, seven months or however much time you wish to invest in yourself. Alongside the book we have also created a Change Wizard Journal with space for your own ideas, goals and reflections as well as the questions and exercises we have provided in both books. These steps are:
Step One: The Mechanics of Change: understanding how change occurs; knowing how your mind works; knowing how you learn, how you can unlearn and relearn and continue to be open to new possibilities
Step Two: Becoming aware: what is Working and What is Not, and why; inevitable change, being proactive within trends.
Step Three: Defining your Positive Outcomes: what will change look like and feel like, how will others know when you have got there?
Step Four: Developing the Will to Change: identifying the benefits of change, and engaging the emotion necessary to motivate you to work at it.
Step Five: Planning how you are going to get there; identifying what skills, capabilities, resources and support you need to help you achieve your goals.
Step Six: Practice makes perfect: overcoming obstacles, eliciting feedback, learning and persisting
Step Seven: Enjoying Success and setting new goals: Celebration and review. What worked and what did not work? The continuing stream of life – where are you going next?
I think our generation, growing up with parents who had just been through World War II and who had been born during World War I, understood that life could be tough. That attitude probably hampered some of our goals, certainly for women whose roles were often still defined in the home or in lowly jobs. Yet I think the understanding that our lives could be full of change and challenge gave us that sense of being prepared and we realised we had to develop resilience and be adaptable. From what I hear and read I think perhaps younger generations are having to learn the importance of resilience a little later in life and that, alongside the dreams, we all have to develop the character to withstand both the downs as well as the ups.
Richard Israel and I have been great believers in developing this self-knowledge and preparing oneself for the future. As Socrates is reputed to have said “the unexamined life is not worth living”.
The Change Wizard and the Change Wizard Journal together with our time management fable The Front Page give you the method to examine your life and consider your future, whatever your age. The exercises can be reworked at any new stage of your life – and there will always be new stages. These stages can be daunting or exciting and our firm belief is that investing a few minutes of your time to think about yourself, the life you want to create, and how you want to be within it, is worth every moment.
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