Category: Change

How the Rate of Evolution Increases Dramatically Right Now

We have mentioned several times in our book and posts how information generation is evolving exponentially. Another statistics: “According to a calculation Hal Varian, an economist at Google, and I made, total worldwide information has been increasing at the rate of 66 percent per year for many decades.” – says Kevin Kelly in ‘What Technology Wants‘. Refer to the the exponential deception to really understand what that means!

info_explosion“Compare that explosion to the rate of increase in even the most prevalent manufactured stuff —such as concrete or paper— which averages only 7 percent annually over decades” Kevin Kelly continues.

But the most astonishing is not that. The most astonishing is that we seem to evolve much quicker as well: “Today, according to research on the mutations in our DNA, our genes are evolving 100 times faster than in preagricultural times“.  Evolution is also quicker!

We are part of the system that evolves, and our evolution pace also quickens – although not as quickly as the world around us.

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How to Make Communication Easier: Develop Trust!

“In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust” – says Ben Horowitz in his book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.

communicationThus, one way to improve communication is to develop trust beforehand. The reason is obvious – it removes a lot of filters and also, adds a number of assumptions that do not need to be verbalized again during actual communication.

It is actually what marketing often tries to do: by develop trust in a brand or a person, it makes communication easier by removing obstacles to communication.

Without going into the techniques of marketing, there are a number of occasions where developing trust first before attempting to communicate a complicated message is probably the most effective way to communicate – even if that requires an investment of time and interaction.

It is possible to build trust effectively and with limited effort and time, so do not skip that step. Next time you have something complicated or difficult to communicate, do not hesitate to build trust first!

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How Crisis Moments in Our Life Define Ourselves

I am always amazed at how moderately or acute crisis situations define our lives and define ourselves. Our life is but a succession of relatively quiet and stable moment with transitions or difficult situations in between. It is actually quite similar to nature’s behavior where short, catastrophic events shape the world, which otherwise is relatively quiet and stable (and denotes that we live in a complex system).

crisis definitionCrisis and difficult situations define ourselves by the way we respond to them. Those key moments are turning points defining our future life and therefore in many aspects our future selves.

And there is no way we can escape from these turning points. We can try to keep the stable moments we crave as long as possible, but life is such that at some point, disaster or other types of crisis will strike.

Like we can find out true self by identifying what we dislike in others, we shape our true identity by the way we respond to crisis situations.

Faced with a crisis, a profound change in your life conditions, the way we respond reveal and shapes what we are. Crisis moments are not nice, they are a necessary evil we can’t avoid. We can just respond the way we want to be. We can, and we must shape our response, even when the world seems to be crumbling around us.

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How to Get in Touch with Your True Self

Getting in touch with our true Self is very important to determine who we are and be grounded in driving our life. How can we achieve this?

Getting in touch with your true self must be your first priority“One of the best ways to get in touch with your real self is to notice those things that you tend to passionately dislike in others” say James and Claudia Altucher in ‘The Power of No‘.

Thus, instead of trying to find a mirror to reflect who we are, we should maybe rather seek to identify what repulses us to really identify what makes us unique.

This method is quite powerful but requires certainly some subtlety. First it is not recommended to hand around too long with people you dislike. Second, some aspects that we dislike in others might not always be that obvious, and might require some research and further getting to know the person.

Situations where we have to be with people we moderately or passionately dislike, like some social or professional situations, are thus great opportunities to define ourselves better! By defining ourselves as the contrary of some behavior that we do not like, our own identity gets better defined every time it happens.

The next time you react negatively to some other person behavior, think about how this defines yourself better.

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How Enticing Curiosity is a key Leadership Skill

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that “leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity“.

leadership-powellThis quote made me realize that in quite a few instances I had followed a leader more out of the curiosity to see what would happen than out of certainty that following the leader would be the right path. And indeed in those instances, it turned out not to be the easy way, still it was probably the most interesting experience.

There is somewhat of a contradiction between leadership and curiosity. One might think that curiosity is a personal attribute of the follower, while leadership is an ability of the leader. Of course, the leader can provoke curiosity. And possibly, by provoking curiosity, the most effective attraction mechanism is set up. So, the leader should provoke curiosity.

This has wide-ranging consequences compared to more traditional concepts of leadership. Maybe the leader should not paint a compelling vision, but rather instead make it the undefined object of an experiment, enticing curiosity and commitment from his followers.

Create curiosity to lead. An interesting concept that should certainly be developed further!

The quote is from Ben Horowitz book, ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers‘

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Why Accepting Yourself Will Change the World

Building up on our post ‘Why You Need to Accept Yourself First to be Able to Change‘, we can go further and state that being ourselves does not only help ourselves change, but will also change the world.

changeOn that, let us quote extensively Carl Rogers from his famous book ‘On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy‘: “the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.”

Why is that? As Carl Rogers continues, “It is a very paradoxical thing — that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself, then he finds not only himself changing; but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life.”

Did you still hesitate? Be yourself fully. Change yourself and change the world!

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What People Will Remember from You

I love that quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”- Maya Angelou.

angelou-quoteThis is true in all sorts of settings, so let’s review a few areas where it is applicable:

When doing public talks or presentations, the real important experience lies at the emotional level. This requires physical comfort, and creating strong emotions in the audience, either through stunning experiences and images, or by referring to people’s own emotional-laden issues.

When creating art, paintings, writing a book or cutting a movie, the emotions that will be created in the viewer is what will make the creation memorable on the long term.

When working with people in a team, what people will remember is any emotions, good or bad, you’ve created during that time. This also applies to one-off interviews.

The list is long. My points was to emphasize how this quote, which is most often used in the field of romantic relationships, can be applied throughout our lives.

You want to be remembered? Create emotions.

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How Real Relationships Induce Change and Cannot Remain Static

“Real relationships tend to change rather than to remain static” says Carl Rogers in his famous book ‘On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy‘.

Friends-coffeeReal relationships are relationships that go beyond the superficial into real giving and receiving. They are relationships in which we are authentic and were we discover ourselves.

Thus, necessarily, this quality of relationships will tend to create change in ourselves and the relationship equally needs to change to adapt to these new circumstances.

Following the same idea, Carl Rogers, notes, in his practice of psychotherapy, “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”

Poor relationships foster defensiveness, passivity, and prostration. Real relationships, on the contrary, foster growth and expansion. Their potential can be unlimited.

Review your relationships and ask yourself which are those that change and mature over time. These might be much deeper relationships than the others.

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How to Avoid Suffering when Changing

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional” is quite a common quote. We need pain to change (and some pleasure to leverage the change). We can still avoid suffering.

suffering is optionalSuffering is very much a psychological effect. What makes the difference between pain (external) and suffering (internal) is that we can either react or respond; we can choose not to suffer even in the face of pain. And we have always the choice: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” says Viktor Frankl (ref our post ‘How We Always Have a Choice, Even in the Worst Situation‘).

Change will come with pain. It should not come with suffering or bitterness. You can choose not to let it happen. Choose.

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Why Pleasure Can Accelerates Change (only Together with Pain)

It is quite commonplace to state that pain is required for change, and that change occurs when the pain to change is less than the pain to stay in the same condition.

pain changeTony Robbins says  that we need in addition to access some kind of leverage to accelerate change. That pain is required for change. And thus, “to access leverage, you must help someone associate massive PAIN to not changing NOW, and massive PLEASURE to changing immediately. The motivation is based on both pain AND pleasure. Pain is short-term motivation, but you need the pleasure side for long-term motivation.”

He continues, “The truth is everyone in life has developed different strategies or patterns for getting out of pain and into pleasure. Thus, if we want to create permanent and consistent change, what we must do is develop a new set of patterns of how to get out of pain and into pleasure. In other words, in order to create lasting change, we must use pain to get people’s attention and energize them to want to make the change, but then we must link pleasure to the new pattern to make it last”

To create change, do not just highlight the pain of not changing – entice the change with immediate and future pleasure. A new way to design Change Management plans?

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Why You Need to Accept Yourself First to be Able to Change

“The Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can Change” – Carl Rogers in the book ‘On Becoming a Person‘. Carl Rogers is a famous psychologist that is one of the founders of the coaching approach to change. His book is highly recommended if you are interested in personal change and growth.

The Curious Paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can ChangeThis is a very deep statement. Because of often we think that we should force ourselves to change, with the result that we create resistance and frustration… with poor results.

Carl Rogers’s opinion, forged after decades of giving therapy and counselling, is that deep-seated change is actually possible only when one accepts himself fully, including his emotions and feelings that often tend to be repressed. This deep preparatory work might take months and years before we might be ready for change.

It is interesting that in some respect the same might hold for change in organizations: self-awareness is a necessary pre-requisite.

It might be a good idea to focus first on a deep acceptance of yourself, of your feelings and other psychological and physiological reactions, before venturing down the path of change. A worthwhile investment indeed that will repay multiple times as after, change will become easy and self-sustaining.

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How to Look Beyond Aggressiveness and Hate

“The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear” – said Gandhi. When we express hate (or even just mundane aggressiveness) we in fact somehow express our underlying fear, our intrinsic insecurity.

hate as a distillate created by fearIt is amazing to consider when someone screams at you, how fragile and fearful that person must be. I find it is an excellent way to overcome the natural rush of adrenaline and the emotional reaction to the situation (which typically hovers around our primitive fight or flight reaction) . Plus it provides some empathy that might come useful in that situation (Of course if it becomes too obvious that you pity the person that is aggressive that might not resolve the problem at this instant so remain just calm and composed!)

Fear creates ravages throughout the world and in our daily environment. Nip the fear out, find out precisely what is feared and you’ll overcome aggressiveness.

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