Change face us all the time, in our personal and work lives. If we decided not to change we stay still – that is – wake up, go to work, participate in the production line, go home, eat, sleep and wake up in the morning and it all starts again. This sort of life brings no excitement and leaves us open to redundancy and take-over.

We are sometimes afraid of change, the multiple risks they present prevents us from considering change or dipping our toes in the waters of new things. This fear comes from the unexpected and possibly from being hurt or disappointed from past changes.

This pattern of life brings predictability where change occurs externally – such as changes to your health and the environment around you. We all want to move on in life, looking a better quality of live, freedom to experience new things – this means that change is the starting point, it is a prerequisite.

I’ve found change can be classified into two categories, one that is a challenge for an individual and the other for your team or organisation. 

Change is multi-dimensional – you experience some changes are easy and some just don’t happen. The majority of change we experience is real change or the reality of change, whereas what is not considered is what we perceived as change, the Perceptive Change.

Perceptive Change happens before the actual change occurs – this is a creative change that involves thinking, takes an instance to form in our minds, has no continuous process and embodies the envision of a new system. This type of change morphs when a particular change is tabled and first discussed, it starts as a thought and you tend to internalise it with more information. It’s always a personal thing and the route it follows is always based on individual fears, experiences and reality of situations. 

Whereas Reality Change is the real change itself, it involves innovation and requires action, it follows a continuous process and can take a long time as you step through elements of the change and with ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ it ultimately provides something new. This type of change, as mentioned, is real. You will feel it and see it as it affects those around you and how your interact with each other – adjustments to processes, procedures and your values will be impacted. Ultimately this is the tangible change that we refer to when we discuss and experience change. 

By far perceptive change is the most difficult to predict and manage, as human beings we are all different.

Maya Angelou stated that ‘it is by observation that in the future they will not remember what you said, they will not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel’

This leaves clues on how to deal with perceptive change but where do we start – as recovering alcoholic say ‘you need to accept your an alcoholic before you can address it …’. 

Similarly understanding that change is not one dimensional and accepting it is a great clue and acts as a starting point in addressing any change

Photo credit: marsmet546 / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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