From My Perspective: Changes & Opportunities

Life is changing, there’s no way around it. It changes each day.

Sometimes those changes are small and incremental, while other times, they are a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, knock you off your feet, welcome to your new reality kind of change.

Sometimes, you’ve known the change is going to happen. You know you’re starting a new job, a new venture, moving to a new place, starting school or finishing school. Sometimes, it comes without warning. A new boss has arrived and is shaking things up, a family member passes away, or you suddenly, it just hits you and you realize you can’t live the way you’ve been living any longer.

I’m one of the most resistant to change people I know. I generally despise it. Just let me live in my own little unchanging world, would you? Stop changing the rules, the way we do things, even my norms.

But in reality, change is where the growth is. It’s not always good, but generally, it propels us, or whatever “it” is, to something new, different and often better than we could have imagined.

I like my comfortable comfort zone where things just stay the same, but the truth of the matter is this: there aren’t very many opportunities in that comfort zone. Most of the opportunities in life, in a job, in relationships and almost everything else occur just outside that comfort zone.

Change happens around us all the time, often without us ever realizing something has changed. Or it’s something that completely rocks our world and changes everything, right down to the core. We often fight it, kicking and screaming until we have no choice, and once we’ve settled into the change, we realize it’s not such a bad thing after all.

Change, at least in my eyes, is extremely scary. It’s a lot of unknown “stuff.” It’s a lot of “what if,” and a lot of “oh, (insert your favorite profanity).” When most people think of all the what ifs, myself included, we think of all of the things that could go wrong. Rarely, if ever, do we think about all of the things that could go right. What if, instead of thinking of failing, we think about flying? What if, instead of thinking about how much we don’t want things to change, we think instead, “How can I grow, or how am I growing from this?”

I wonder what difference changing the perspective to change would make.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time (and one that has helped me through a lot of things in my life) from the late Dr. Wayne Dyer. I may have shared that quote before in another column, but I think it bears repeating. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Instead of looking at change with all the doom and gloom and uncertainty, look at change as the opportunity to do, see or become something new; to become something beautiful, to create a new version of you, of your business, of your life. Instead, feel how good change can be when you see it more as an opportunity and less of burden.

Change can be hard, but it can also bring so many of those amazing opportunities. We may not even realize what those opportunities might be. Sometimes it’s a new way of doing things; other times it causes us to move in a whole new direction. And if we weren’t so busy fighting the change - the new direction is exactly where we wanted to go, it may just not have been the way we thought we would get there.

Change isn’t going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it’s happening at a speedier rate that it ever has happened before. We could fight it, be scared of it, resist it or we could embrace it and create all sorts of new opportunities for ourselves.

The choice is ours, the time is now. I think I’ll head out today with a fresh awareness of the change around me and the opportunities that await me. Join me, won’t you?