Below are 7 easy ways to deal with change

1. Dealing with change requires courage to deal with normal anxiety.

Anxiety goes with the territory when you are dealing with change. We are often not sure of what may be required of us as we move into a new situation. We worry that we won’t make the “right” decisions, or that the decision we thought was right at the time will turn out to be a grave mistake in the long run. In the modern world, anxiety is not caused by a lack of information so much as an overwhelming amount of competing information. What to believe? What to dismiss? How to decide?

Have courage, my friend. The root word for courage is “couer,” the French word for “heart.” Looking at your life and acting to deliberately create change takes a lot of heart. There is only so much you can know, but one thing you can know is how you feel about whatever change you are contemplating. If you are riding a seesaw of ambivalence, you may need more time for contemplation or research. Courage is the quality providing the motivation and fortitude to take the next best step.

2. Let go of the things you cannot control and focus on the changes you can make.

There are a lot of things we cannot control like weather, traffic, equipment failure, the larger economy, and other people’s life choices you may or may not agree with. The biggest single thing you can control in the face of change is your attitude. Notice that change involves both risk and reward.

To keep fear from getting the upper hand, spend time thinking about your options, discussing those options with trusted advisors (family, friends, professional colleagues). You may find that even with a lot of positive feedback for making a change, your heart just isn’t in it. That’s OK. Your body knows better than your mind what is a good fit for you.

3. Notice how negativity bias can make mistakes look bigger and successes look smaller.

It’s human nature to magnify the possibility of failure over success. It’s a brain thing. Negativity bias is the tendency of the human brain to give more weight and attention to negative experiences or information than to positive ones of equal intensity. To paraphrase the neuroscientist Richard Hanson when discussing negativity bias, “Mistakes stick to our minds like Velcro, but successes slide off like Teflon.”

From an evolutionary point of view, mistakes can kill you, but success is a kind of “so what.” If you pick berries 20 times and nothing happens, that’s all well and good. But the one time you almost stepped on a poisonous snake while gathering berries will be indelibly etched on your brain because stepping on that snake might have killed you. Your brain is constantly scanning for what is novel or different in your environment and what is a threat to your survival.

You’ve certainly heard the saying “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Never forget you just might die when engaging in risky behavior. On the other hand, unless you are an Olympic ski jumper, most of the actions we choose in modern life will not be life-threatening. Even if your choices sometimes feel that way because your brain is warning of a threat.

When dealing with change, we humans also tend to think we cannot handle things when they don’t go perfectly. That’s not true. We often have more options ready to be launched when something goes wrong than we ever realized. For instance, if you are moving and the van you rented breaks down, you can sit on the side of the road and cry, “Poor me,” or you can get on your mobile phone and call the rental company for a replacement van. If that doesn’t work because you can’t get an answer late at night, you can think about people you know with a truck or investigate mechanics who might help you. Cellphones can access a remarkable number of resources.

4. Assume any change, good or bad, will be uncomfortable and cause uncertainty.

Some of you may have heard the term “BANI” describing the state of the world and our collective psyches as “Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible.” Jamais Cascio, an American anthropologist, futurist, and author coined the term in 2018 to describe a world characterized by chaotic, high-stress conditions published on Medium in “Facing the Age of Chaos” (April 29, 2020). Brittle is the opposite of resilient; anxious the enemy of serenity; non-linear is a feature of every complex system with a lot of moving parts, and incomprehensible is the nemesis to understanding.

Uncertainty is a key feature of the human condition, much as we crave certainty. In the big picture, the sun will rise for millennia after we are gone, so we can at least count on another day. However, what tomorrow looks like after today is highly uncertain. A couple of months ago, I woke up with what in layman’s terms is called a “pinched nerve” on my left side. My daily regime was upended with doctor’s appointments, medication, x-rays, eventual MRI, and physical therapy. I had to rearrange my schedule to accommodate a lot of doctor and physical therapy appointments. This was an unwanted change I would not have predicted the day before.

Just as I advise my clients, I used humor, optimism, and extreme self-care to help cope. I joked that my career as a competitive sculler was over. I practiced “cynical optimism”: preparing for the worst and best outcomes, a bulging disc requiring an operation versus an end to physical therapy and the tingling-numbness in left arm and hand.

5. Use your available resources and stay grounded as you deal with change.

As you work through any transition, look at your available resources. What other resources do you need to follow through with a given change? Do you need to get better psychologically, get well physically, or grow your expertise in a particular area? What experience and knowledge you must have to succeed in a new or different position?

You may need to do a lot more research on the web, find people to talk to in areas that interest you, or enroll in a course to expand your expertise. Wherever you are, there are bound to be resources available to you. Public and university libraries give you access to large databases. Librarians themselves can be a resource, referring you to information or technology you did not even know was available.

You may also need to spend some time building stronger relationships with the people you already know. Your good friends and colleagues want the best for you and will do what they can to share additional resources. They may even know people you don’t who can share resources with you. Make the most of what you already have in the place you are.

6. Rewrite your own life story with a positive spin.

Learn to tell your story as an active participant rather than a passive recipient when change occurs. We understand (or confirm) who we are through the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Whether we’re discussing someone else’s success in school, a tragedy in their personal life, or listening to their amazing adventures, humans will always remember the tales through a story-telling lens. The same is true for the stories you tell about yourself.

You can reframe and rewrite your own story at any point in your life. What is the story you are telling yourself about the life you are leading now? Do you engage in “poor me” narratives? Or do you say, “I was just lucky” to be in the right place at the right time? While the second statement may be true, you likely recognized an opportunity and took action to take advantage of the situation.

You can redefine yourself and the story you tell at any time in your life. Think about your story of getting to where you are, and if it’s a negative account like “I have no idea why I was chosen,” change it. Create a version that tells a new story about your path. Keep the interpretation of past events positive. If you lost your job, emphasize how it opened unexpected possibilities. Use the new version of you past to explain what you want to do next. This will especially help you if you are looking for a new job or seeking to change careers.

As you reframe the old version of your way, ask yourself:

• What is the story of my life?
• Are there patterns I repeat again and again?
• Am I attached to these patterns? If so, how?
• How do I want to define my life now?
• How would I be different if I saw myself differently?
• What do I see as the meaning or purpose embodied by my life?
• How do I want to be remembered?

We also learn morals by listening to fables and sermons. We find the kernel of truth embedded in every myth ever told by humans to explain life. Maybe you have a meaningful message you want to convey about rising above negative circumstances or explaining how you came to help other people work to achieve their dreams.

One example is how steel baron Andrew Carnegie came to fund public libraries. To escape poverty, Carnegie’s family moved in 1843 from Scotland to Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now Pittsburgh) when he was 12. He immediately began working as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory. Andrew was unexpected given access along with several other working-class boys to a small private library with about 400 books. He later said, this action “”opened the windows through which the light of knowledge streamed.” He vowed if he ever had money, he would provide free access to books as a way to help others learn and grow.

You may not like reputation for ruthless efficiency in business, but he believed what he wrote in his1889 “Gospel of Wealth” essay, that the wealthy have a moral obligation to use their fortunes for the benefit of society. Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie funded over 2,500 free public libraries in the U.K., Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Fiji. with the requirement that local communities provide the land and 10% of the cost to construct and maintain the buildings in perpetuity as a condition of his gift. Approximately 800 of these libraries still function as libraries today.

Obviously, we do not all have a rage-to-riches life story. However, you may have inspired others through your examples of kindness and appreciation during a project. Perhaps you mentored others through a research and development endeavor. Or maybe you’ve dedicated your life to raising children who can engage with the world compassionately.

7. Notice the fear and threat responses behind your own resistance to change.

Our brains are designed to notice whatever is novel in our environment. We are constantly processing information and scanning our current situation for any possible threat to our survival. This is why you can sit in a conference room after a negative reaction to your presentation and experience a dry mouth with your heart pounding. If the threat feels real, even if we know our physical survival is not at stake, our brains can still process the experience as if a tiger is about to pounce.

Clearly, it’s safer to move away from a threat than to move toward it, and that is what you are more likely to do automatically. You may find yourself acidly defending your presentation as your brain decides you should strike back at the threat. You may find yourself leaving the presentation room in a hurry to control your anxiety. You may find yourself unable to speak if your audience asks questions that you feel unable to answer. In other words, your limbic system is going to defend any perceived threat with a fight, flight, or freeze response.

Whether you are planning for an interview, writing an article, sitting in a meeting, or discussing a book on stage, you want your brain to help, not hinder, you. If you change your brain, you change your life. Below are five elements of sustainable brain change to help you create better neural pathways for consciously choosing how to respond to change:

• Envision the exact change
• Expect to experience some resistance
• Expect reappraisal and readjustment
• Know your own threat responses
• Self-regulate your thoughts

Conclusion

Accept that change and transition are ongoing processes you will experience repeatedly and will bring anxiety. That’s just a normal human response. But here’s something we don’t talk about as much: not changing also creates anxiety. Staying stuck, staying still, or trying to hold things in place when everything around you is shifting—that’s its own kind of stress.

Just think about the resistance we are seeing to the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. AI is scary as we wonder whether our job will be eliminated. Using AI also seems to be the way work and personal lives are headed, so we better figure out how to deal with it, along with many other new things bearing down on us that we don’t even see yet.

If anxiety is part of the equation either way, you might as well learn how to accept change and take deliberate steps to keep moving in a new direction. This doesn’t mean you have to love the change right away. I’ve suffered a great deal of anxiety about my writing as new and better large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc., have become readily available.

My choice has been to forge ahead with writing. I write to learn what I think and to investigate what I believe. My stories and perspectives are unique to me and may offer some useful perspectives for other people. Even if, like me, you don’t like a particular change such as AI writing as well or even better than I can, you can still choose how you want to respond. Attitudinal choice is often the key to emotional resilience in the face of profound alterations in our lives. We must learn to accept change and transition as ongoing processes.

Some changes are forced on us—health issues, job transitions, death and loss, or large-scale economic shifts we didn’t see coming. There are also unexpected opportunities that arise when what’s familiar is disrupted. You didn’t necessarily ask for these changes, but how do you react? That part is yours. Once you accept that change has occurred—once you allow yourself to see that a new reality is here—you can start to survive it and eventually even thrive within a new paradigm. It will be your new normal…for a while.

Find more information on Dealing with Change by ordering my new book here.

You can find previous books at the website for TransitioningYourLife

If you still need help implementing lasting change into your life, contact Hillary for a twenty-minute free session.

Tags: attitude, career, change, confidence, happiness, happiness at work, positivity, strategies, success, transition, why change is hard