Talking about change is often threatening. There are fundamentals and reasons to think, feel and act as we do. Some of these reasons are rooted in very unconscious motivations, in physiological conditions, in happy or unhappy events anchored in our history and also in practical or value decisions made consciously.
So, change implies directly threatening our particular balance, our homeostasis. It involves destroying our current state for the promise of a profit, which in the best of cases is a more or less safe bet, but a bet at the end.
In this context, offers appear in our environment, offering change without effort. "Lose weight, no exercise and no obnoxious diets", "Achieve enlightenment in three easy steps", "Open your heart and universal mercy will land on you" and the list could be endless. These offers have the particularity of not being threatening, but attractive. Our selfish and lazy brain will feel full of delicious endorphins that will tell us that this is the true path. "It cannot be that thousands of people are wrong." "It's common sense, if it weren't true, they would have already figured them out." With more or less arguments, we will most likely experience a certain attraction towards these jobless exchange offers.
The reality is that it is tautologically impossible to change without breaking our status quo, our balance, our homeostasis. Let's think about it this way: if you don't break your equilibrium, after the "change" process, your state will be the same as the state you started from. If you break your balance, you have at least three alternatives: to regain it after the change process, to worsen it in a worse state of balance, or to improve it in a better state of balance.
On the other hand, many times we do not choose the situations of change. Our work, our relationships, our life stage, inevitably lead us to the need to experience certain changes. And if we stubbornly cling to a certain state, life itself will make us change.
Change then implies breaking a status quo, a certain equilibrium, going through a process and re-stabilizing in a new equilibrium. If there is no breakdown of equilibrium, then there is no change. We will not have arrived in a new state. This process involves, most of the time, a higher or lower level of resistance. Even in those desired changes, the benefits of which are in our sight, it can be difficult to abandon the old way of doing things. This is a natural event, as human beings, we want stability, certain certainties, we want a balance that assures us against future and uncertain events. This natural need for security, raises the barrier of difficulty, when we have decided to change or external events put us in the need to do so.
Even in those cases of people who like the adrenaline of the unknown, and apparently do not fear change, if change is about appeasing and responding obediently to a routine, resistance will come to show up.
In the context of the organization, with extreme frequency we must face changes. From the simplest, change of technology, change of job, change of team, functions, processes, to more complex ones, change of leadership, enrichment of the role, change of structure, change of systems, culture, market , more ambitious goals, etc. Depending on the exchange rate, people will experience greater or lesser degrees of resistance. These individual differences are extremely important when managing resistors.
Here, a possibility to approach the change in a different way. It is about expanding our "behavioral repertoire" and not focusing on abandoning a behavior, that is, incorporating a new behavior, instead of eliminating a present behavior. Understanding repertoire as the set of behaviors that we currently manifest.
Increasing the behavioral spectrum
If we ask ourselves why some behaviors are so syntonic with ourselves and others cost us so much, we will quickly arrive at that our repertoire of probable behaviors is determined by multiple factors, some of a biological order, some explainable from learning and others from learning. will and preferences. The end result of this mix of probable behaviors is our “way of being”. It is clear that we can have behaviors different from those, some just by proposing them and others with a hard work of incorporation. For example, in the academic field, professors are often seen with great facility for research, but with great difficulties in taking classes. The behaviors associated with one activity and another are different, but academic work requires both. We could find the inverse case, a pr
Comments