How we deal with change defines our business, family and future success – it can boost our productivity improvement or destroy our future, if we allow it.
When I lost my eyesight, a mutual friend introduced me to Erik Weihenmayer, a climber that summited the Seven Summits (the tallest mountains on every continent) and just finished kayaking the Grand Canyon. He also happens to be blind.
He invited me to go on a tandem bike ride with a couple of his friends as captains. When we stopped for lunch, he reminded me that I am the very same person I had been only a month earlier, only without one of my senses. It was such a wakeup call!
I am who I am, and should not be defined by the lack of eyesight. Neither should you, by your age, health, or general wellbeing.
Change, in my view, comes in three variants:
- Environmental change – We age, the weather destroys our crop, we get a nasty diagnosis.
- Purposeful change – You work hard and get the promotion, you develop new software, a competitor puts you out of business.
- Disruptive change – This kind of change can come from anywhere—an environmental change, like a bad diagnosis, can certainly disrupt your life.
Let’s look at each of these changes more closely, discover how they impact our productivity improvement, and how to approach each of them to ensure happiness and success.
Productivity Improvement – Environmental change
This type of change happens through natural causes, and has been around since the beginning of time.
Science has both helped and hindered this variant of change. We now live longer, age more gracefully, and have remedies to illnesses that prevent their epidemic spread and cures that were unthinkable only last year.
How environmental change impacts our productivity improvement:
How many people do you know that have aged wonderfully and others that just are not willing to change their way of life, to help the aging process? Or people that react one way or another to a nasty diagnosis?
I realize that this kind of change is many times very difficult to face. We cannot always see (or chose to ignore) the bright side, by being curious about alternatives.
In my book, “How to Embrace Curiosity, Disruption, and Imagination to See Yourself as a Change Agent” I give you a drastic example:
“You are given a year to live. Do you choose the road of darkness and despair for that year, or the road of light?”
You can curse the darkness, or light a candle. And how you chose to deal with it, will determine how the world will deal with you!
How to Approach Environmental Change to Ensure Success & Happiness
- Be curious. With a curious attitude you can combat the effects this kind of change will have on your life.
- Look at alternatives, look at what positives are there, however hard they may be to find.
- Find the humor in your life.
- Focus on the results you want to achieve.
Productivity Improvement – Purposeful Change
This is the type of change that you or someone else sets out to make intentionally, and that affects you.
How purposeful change impacts our productivity improvement:
- You are working hard towards a promotion, when you suddenly get sick;
- Your house is taken out by a tornado;
- People decide to improve on your invention;
- Your spouse decides to leave you;
- A politician changes the law that allowed your business to exist as it did;
While environmental change, as described above, has a purposeful component to it, here, you have a lot more control.
You are the one deciding where to take your life, how fit you want to be, how to shape your career, and so on.
How to Approach Purposeful Change to Ensure Success & Happiness
- Redouble your efforts, rather than giving in to the fate of inevitability.
- Be curious about why your spouse is ready to leave you, long before you reach that point.
- Research your future. As you look into what is the best school for your child, the best car for your lifestyle and budget, the best treatment for your child’s diagnosis and even that marriage counselor you are seeing to help salvage your relationship, you exercise curiosity in the service of purposeful change.
Productivity Improvement – Disruptive Change
A purposeful change from a subordinate that wants your job, a competitor that breaks into your market, or a spouse that decides to leave you, can and will be disruptors.
Disruption can ruin a plan, or change your vision for your life, but should not, by any means, derail your ability to be happy. Setbacks are a part of our lives. And we decide how they should affect us emotionally, not the other way around.
How disruptive change impacts our productivity improvement:
The horseless carriage (the car) disrupted the horse industry, but that took several generations.
The personal computer disrupted the typewriter industry, and that happened within one generation.
Netflix disrupted Blockbuster, and that happened within a handful of years!
Steve Jobs did not only disrupt the telephone industry, but also the movie industry, the music industry and the book industry.
While I do not think that us mere mortals can cause the kind of disruption that he did, that should not stop us from striving to disrupt how things are currently done:
How to Approach Disruptive Change to Ensure Success & Happiness
- Be an avid consumer of information regarding your industry and the topics that affect your life.
- Attend seminars and industry events and watch your competition closely.
- Be curious about what your team is thinking, particularly that new employee—or your spouse.
- Assess your future and the potential game-changers in your life.
Andre’s words of advice:
- Create an environment where you and your team (household) are always open to change. You achieve that by being curious, by listening, by reading and by constantly challenging yourself to find a better way to do what you do.
- Don’t get stuck in the status quo. The old saying “if it isn’t broken…leave it alone” no longer holds true. If it isn’t broken…break it and put it together again, in a better way!
- Be curious about how to build in continuous improvement into your life and business.
With curiosity we can and should be able to always see an alternative to change that comes at us, but above all, stay a step ahead of change—and help us become the disruptors instead of the disrupted.
Be a change agent, not a victim of it! Soak up all the positive energy from the world and allow your productivity improvement to radiate and lighten not just yourself, but your environment as well.
Let’s Begin This Journey Together
