This week's success principle is Embrace Change. This is a pretty short chapter, perhaps because the concept (if not the execution) of this principle is rather straightforward. Things change. Fighting with that reality simply ends up hurting us. Jack Canfield is pretty abrupt about it: "Grow or die."
Canfield points out that there are 2 kinds of change: cyclical and structural. We tend to accept cyclical change - like the flow of the weather, the trends in the market. Structural change means there's no going back. Things won't be like they used to be, whether we like that or not. And this is where resistance is more likely to show up.
It's funny because in some ways I'm a rather flexible person. (Okay, I can hear my family laughing already) What I mean by this is that I love a lot of things and so I can be happy with a many possible options in situations. But one of the most challenging things I've had to accept about myself is that yes, I'm a free spirit but I don't find it easy to go with the flow. (Maybe I actually have to revise "free spirit" to "stubbornly independent spirit") If I've planned what I'm going to do for the night and Justin says, "Btw, we've been invited out to dinner with so-and-so, want to go?" My immediate and instant reaction is "No." Even if what I was planning to do was laundry.
This surprises me about me. The only way it kind of makes sense is that I'm juggling so many things that any shift makes me feel unbalanced and I'm charging ahead with such vigor that change makes me screech to an adrenalin-filled emergency stop. As I'm writing this, I'm starting to see that maybe if I tuned down the intensity, I might be more open to change. And why is that useful? Because I might miss out on something fantastic along the way. I mean, dinner with friends sure trumps laundry.
Where do you resist change?
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