SELF MOTIVATION - 8 Tips For Dealing With Change

8 Tips For Dealing With Change

 By ALAN.MATTHEWS

How well do you deal with major changes in your life or work?

For some people, change is exciting. It’s a chance to do something new, to try things out, to learn about themselves, to develop new skills.

But, for many people, change tends to be a bit scary. It’s threatening, uncomfortable, stressful.

Whichever camp you’re in, the one thing you can be certain of is that change is going to happen, whether you choose it or not, whether you like it or not.

Of course, your own attitude will determine just how difficult you find any change that happens to you and how well you handle it. The problem is, it’s easy to talk about seeing change as an opportunity, having a positive attitude, etc. but it’s much harder to do this in practice.

Think of some major changes which have happened in your life. They may include:

§  moving house

§  changing schools

§  going to College or University

§  leaving home

§  starting, or ending, a relationship

§  the loss of a loved one

§  changing jobs

§  being made redundant

§  starting your own business

§  moving to another country

§  your children growing up and leaving home

I’m sure there are lots of others you could include.

If any of these things have happened to you, how well did you handle them? And what affected your attitude to the changes and your ability to deal with them?

I suspect some of the following factors would have had an impact:

§  Whether or not the change was your own choice or something which you felt just happened to you or was forced upon you.

§  Your feeling of involvement in the process of change and how much control you felt you had over what was happening.

§  Your emotional commitment to how things were before the change happened

§  Your confidence and trust in the other people who were involved in the change.

§  Your understanding of the reasons for the change.

§  Your confidence about your ability to deal with the situation after the change happened.

§  How wide an impact the change had, i.e. did it just affect a small part of your life or did it seem to change everything?

§  Your degree of certainty, or uncertainty, about how things would work out in the end.

In terms of change at work, many organisations fail to handle the situation well. They don’t always recognise that change is extremely stressful for people and that they could ease this stress by attending to some of the factors I’ve listed above, e.g. by giving people information, involving them in the process, explaining the reasons for change.

So here are 8 tips to help you handle any change effectively, especially change at work, especially in situations where the change has been imposed on you ( which is most often the case ).

1.   Recognise that change is inevitable, nothing is going to stay the same forever. In fact, you would probably get very bored if it did.

2.   Communicate with others. Seek out information from people who know what’s going on. Get clarity about your position and what’s going to happen. But don’t pay attention to rumours and gossip.

3.   Be flexible. Give yourself options, work out a plan. Move from thinking, “If only things wouldn’t change…” to “Given that things are changing, what are my options, how can I make the best of it?”

4.   Continue to do your work to the best of your ability and try not to be distracted.

5.   Be positive in your actions and attitude. Make a conscious effort to look for positive aspects of the change.

6.   Avoid people who are constantly moaning and complaining about it and resist the temptation to spend time complaining about it yourself.

7.   Focus on areas of your life and work which are not changing. It may seem as if your whole life is being turned upside down but this probably isn’t true. Focus on the constants, the areas of stability.

8.   Get involved – do something. Don’t sit back feeling like a victim, take some control, make some decisions.

A lot of stress tends to come from feeling that you’re not in control of things, that you’re getting overwhelmed by events. Taking these actions will help you to take back control and to feel more in charge of your own destiny.