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How to Talk About Change
How should speakers, writers, and other communicators talk about change most effectively? Not the way we’ve been doing it. Not with all the moral outpourings that usually go with the change imperative. How else? To understand the answer, it’s important to think about how we deal with change.
Not well.
We beat ourselves up over change. We don’t like it, often. We resist it, then blame ourselves for doing so. We pay lip service to the idea that ‘the only constant is change’ but few of us live our lives as if that were so.
In fact, if we are being honest, we’re often traumatized by change. Job losses, relationship challenges, changes to living conditions, changes around us — all of it can throw us for a proverbial loop.
A good deal of our dysfunctional behavior around change comes from the natural fear of loss that derives ultimately from our evolutionary sense of the precarious nature of life back in the woolly mammoth era. Food was scarce, danger was omnipresent, and the fire in the cave kept going out. Under those conditions, it would be natural to crave continuity and fear change.
But another part of our ineptitude around change comes from a misunderstanding of our actual agency in our daily lives. Here’s how it works. We believe ourselves to be mostly aware and in charge of our lives in a…
