Accidents

‘They were meant for each other’.  Really?  The truth is that nobody is intended for anyone else: relationships happen by chance.  If you use a dating app you have some choice as to who you might want to meet, and however you end up meeting someone, you do have a choice as to whether or not to proceed with the relationship. 

In fact, limited choices aside, relationships – and hence any subsequent generations born of those relationships – are largely a matter of chance or accidental encounters.  When we think about the past it can appear to be a logical unfolding of events over which you had control, but just consider how much your path in life has depended on whether or not you took opportunities that were presented.  ‘If only I hadn’t….’; ‘I’m so glad I decided to…’.  

We often remind participants in the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® workshops that nothing is static: the one constant in life is change, much of it completely unpredictable.  Change is definitely a challenge, and a way of reframing the future is as a sequence of accidents waiting to happen.  

Resilience is the ability to adapt to these unpredictable changes.  They occur in every aspect of your life, and although the Challenge of Change programme is delivered in the context of corporate training, and aimed at helping people to be happy at work, the principles apply equally to life outside of work.  Indeed, during follow-up contact, a frequent comment is how much the programme has helped people deal with problems in all aspects of their lives.

Any change makes a demand, which is erroneously described as ‘good stress’.   Once you define stress properly – as ruminating about emotional upsets – there is no good stress.  Churning over upsets just leads to misery, and as our research has shown, it impacts significantly on our health and well-being.  Whenever there’s change there’s a demand to respond, which we label pressure, not stress.  Pressure is inevitable, and can be a great motivator.  The key benefit of the Challenge of Change is showing how to not transform that pressure into stress.

Describing the future as accidents waiting to happen can sound negative and depressing, but there is a different way of considering this.  It is self-evidently true that we have no way of knowing how things will change.  Where anxiety might arise is from trying to control what happens, and then being thrown when things don’t work out as you’d planned.  This is reflected in one of the measures in the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile®, called Perfect Control.  The combination of perfectionism and needing to be in control signalled by high scores on this scale incurs constant vigilance, and emotional upset when unrealistic expectations are not met.

Consider a simple work example: given the financial and time pressures we’re all under, how many things are done absolutely perfectly?  A better way of thinking about tasks is the threshold of added value, which is to continue improving on something until there is no longer any further gain from the additional time and effort spent.  High scorers on the scale just don’t see the threshold.

Planning is an entirely appropriate strategy, which we call reflection to distinguish it from negative rumination.  So too is learning from past errors, but it all depends on your frame of mind.  If your plan is based on one-right-way (usually my way!) you’re likely to score low on another of the Profile scales, called Flexibility.  Low scorers find it hard to adapt to unexpected change, and coupled with a high score on the Rumination scale this is a recipe for miserable churning.  The solution is to take the last two steps in the training: to become detached, which is to keep things in perspective, and to let go.

Appropriate humour is often a facilitator for doing so.  My colleague Nick Petrie offers a great example in our book, ‘Work Without Stress’.  He describes a company of driven individuals who sometimes ended up making molehills into mountains, until one of them might remind the team, ‘Guys, we make milk cartons!’  The ensuing laughter reinstates a proper perspective, and they can then get back on task.  Things remain to be done: what you let go of is not the task but the rumination that goes with losing perspective.

Our plans do often come to fruition, and past experience does inform the way we do things, but we equally distort the past and entertain unrealistic expectations that things will work out exactly as we intended.  Resilience is negotiating change without losing our balance, and resilience is a skill we can acquire and enhance through practise.  The four steps in the training programme provide the way to do so: being awake, maintaining control of our attention, keeping whatever happens in perspective, and letting go of pointless ruminative thinking.