Relax and think back to January 1st.

What resolutions were you ready to tackle head on?

More exercise. Better eating habits. Becoming more organized.

What did you hope for?

What did you hope for these resolutions to bring to your life?

They were going to be life changes, if you stuck with them of course, but they were changes you were choosing to implement in your life. Changes you would have control over.

Now fast forward to March.

April.

May.

June.

A lot has happened in our world in half a year’s time.

Between watching a country burn uncontrollably, a beloved sports icon tragically dying, a pandemic, the fight against systemic racism, this year has been anything but idle.

Did you or a loved one become sick? Unemployed?

Did you learn things about yourself that you never knew before?

How about your family and friends?

Are you still learning?

How has it made you feel? Sad, angry, enlightened.

One thing is for certain. Change has been inevitable this year.

Responding & Reacting to Change

So how do you respond to change? How have you in the past?

For many change is often uncomfortable. It leads to uncertainty. What will my future look like? Will this change be good or bad? Will I be able to adjust to it or learn it? These thoughts focused on negativity and the unknown can naturally then lead to anxiety, uneasiness.

I have seen countless times when something new is introduced in the work place, such as something that will change how we perform our daily job and it is met with so much resistance. Perhaps it is a program, for example, that will actually make the job easier or provide better results. Yet people approach it with resistance because it is new, different, it is change and it causes them to feel uncomfortable. As time goes on however and they become familiar with the change they realize it wasn’t that bad after all.

What distinguishes this year from others is that many events have continued to happen to spark change within ourselves and society as a whole. Events such as the pandemic, that changed so many aspects of our day to day living so rapidly. Collectively the whole world has experienced transformations, many that we typically would not experience in an entire lifetime.

We are experiencing changes that have challenged our ways of thinking, doing and our overall being. Changes that we have had little control over besides the way in which we react to them.

Many are having conversations they often avoided in the past such as regarding white privilege, racism, and societal inequality. Conversations that can be challenging, eye opening, and uncomfortable. Discussions that will continue to spark further change.

So how can we move past the uncomfortable feelings that come along with change? How can we more readily accept it into our lives and even embrace it?

Embracing Change

To start we must have a mind shift . Instead of focusing on the negative and the uneasiness that comes along with change we need to look at all the positive that can arise from it. Throughout our lives so much good certainly has come from change. Perhaps you changed careers at one point and met new colleagues who became friends or made more money or gained more confidence. Graduations, marriage, birth of a child, even divorce…all changes that equated to good results in your life.

Change teaches us, we learn more, and develop through change. Through that development we grow; mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Change can be beautiful as we witness in the change a caterpillar experiences as it transforms into a butterfly. Norbert Juma writes in an article for Everyday Power; “We can learn a lot of lessons about our own growth process from the butterfly lifecycle. The process of metamorphosis relates in many ways with our own moments of transformation”. He continues; ” For a caterpillar to become a butterfly it must change. Likewise, nothing in our human world is permanent. Some things go and are replaced by new ones. Sometimes we have to let the old go so that new can come”.

When we open ourselves up to change we open ourselves up to growth. We develop better resilience, coping skills, empathy and insight. We learn that things can become different and we can move on and even be better than we were before.

Resources:

85 Butterfly Quotes Honoring Your Own Metamorphosis, Norbert Juma, Everyday Power.

Helpguide.org

National Institute for Mental Illness, https://www.nimh.nih.gov