Everyone is conservative. In other words, everyone is opposed to change. Believe it or not, it truly won’t matter much after you are done with this post.
We say change is the only thing that is constant but a great majority of people deliberately want to defy the permanence of change. People are naturally opposed to change and it will take a conscious effort to break loose from this inherent tendency.
I will share with you some evidence that you hate change more than you think you do, and then an important prescription to break free and flow with change as it comes if necessary.
Changing as change makes living so dynamic and interesting. Everything changes, even age does. And that makes it true that change can actually be undesirable a majority of the time.
Does it then mean you are opposed to change because you probably don’t want the undesirable aspects of change? Looks like a defence mechanism, right?
But, by the way, opposing change too extremely can, in fact, impart negatively on productivity and growth. So how then do you strike the balance to allow change and still maintain your sanity?
Why do people not embrace change so easily?
Amongst other reasons, they may not be too sure about the new methods. Below are some other reasons.
Check these out and evaluate how normal it is for people to oppose change. Almost everyone is opposed to change. The only difference is to what extent.
You’d probably don’t want to do things differently or use different methods. It may be because you have come to trust your methods that you are not sure if new ones would be to your advantage.
I recall having to always take the same route to and from any place I visit while growing up. I was so opposed to change that I’d rather stick to my worn-out shoes than use the new ones my parents bought for me. It’s quite normal to want to keep your spoilt items, isn’t it?
I know quite a lot of people who would stack their house full with old stuff that they are obviously not going to use. This is just a small piece of the whole idea.
In the corporate world, employees are opposed to changes in leadership, changes in requirements, processes and ideologies of the company. They ultimately get to flow with the tide in a short while, though not intentionally.
Now, do you think you are free from the spell already?
What about your old shoes that you have refused to let go or do something with?
What about the fear you experience when you want to change your line of business?
Or your inability to modify your habits, even though they may be non-productive?
Few more questions running through your mind now, right?
You may be guilty of some of these but that’s not the plan here.
Like I already pointed out, our hatred for radical change may just be an inherent mechanism to resist certain influences in our lives as humans. So everyone practically hates change to some extent. However, this may not be a negative thing unless it gets beyond the limits that are naturally permissible.
What is the limit then?
It gets truly out of hand when tour conservativeness begins to affect your productivity. Some important ways it can affect your productivity include the following:
You Cannot Take Risks
Everyone grows up with the fear of taking risks. You want to remain where you are as long as it is not killing you yet. However, risk-taking is a very important attribute for success in many areas of life.
You Cannot Think Properly On The Usefulness Of Broken Resources
The concept of recycling is one that helps minimize waste and optimally utilize raw materials.
People that hate to discard their broken items for no reason actually end up not using them at all. It will be difficult for someone who hates change so much to let go of a broken car tire. Whereas, someone who accepts positive change would have planned to discard it. But just before he does that, he’d ask himself, “what can I do with this?”. And that is where creativity comes from.
You Expect Different Results From Same Formulae
Imagine doing a math and you keep applying the same formula to get a different result, what would you notice? You keep getting the same result. People that are anti-change would keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. This totally hampers productivity in entrepreneurship and professionally.
There are so many other ways it may affect our productive life but I want to go on to my prescription on how to break free.
Accepting change is a thing of the mind. It is only difficult at the initial stages of trying, after which you become such a master at letting go and taking risks. I have had to spend a huge sum of money on a project that yielded no much profit yet but I still feel proud for taking the risks. This is an act I once dreaded and hoped never to attempt.
You just have to teach yourself to let go, so much like forgiving someone. For being a miser at discarding broken items without a plan to recycling or reuse, you really need to learn to ‘forgive them away‘.
Every other thing I’m going to say as a solution would revolve around these, but like I said earlier, it is a thing of the mind. And for such things, you really have to do some great job trying to reconfigure your mind. Need more help doing that, you can reach out.
In conclusion, though resistance to change can be a positive thing when the change is a negative one, sometimes opposition to change can get too extreme and in turn, hamper how best we perform both in our individual and corporate lives.
