Seth Godin talks a lot about making change happen. His thinking is always centred around 3 questions.
Who’s it for? What’s it for? What’s the change I’m trying to make?
When I first started learning from him I was resistant and couldn’t hear him. I didn’t believe change was possible. Each human is made up of a certain kind of fabric, and you can’t change the essence of who they are.
Change is really hard and most people can’t make a change within themselves. They are so strongly and unconsciously attached to old belief patterns, values, and stuck in their comfort zones they aren’t willing to do the work necessary to overcome them.
Expecting someone to change who they are is a recipe for disaster.
Following Seth Godin for long enough I learned you can make small but significant change. If change was never possible the world would not be improving.
We wouldn’t be driving cars, we would still be hand delivering our mail to the post office, and we wouldn’t carry computers in our pockets.
Our world has changed significantly in the last 15 years, and people have had to change to keep up with it. Seeing that was life changing for me.
This meant change was possible.
I’ve learned a lot since that realization, but knowing change is possible means knowing things will change, even change itself. I’m not sure making change happen is something that can be mastered, only constantly explored.
But you do need to have a vision and then you need to allow it to happen. Most of us stifle it.
Change is fragile. It breaks easy because there are a lot of moving parts and people involved. You don’t need everyone to accept it at first, but you do need a few. People who are enrolled and believe, or it won’t get wings.
Not everyone wants to be enrolled in your change journey, and in fact most people will try to stop you and put you back in the old box with the old rules in order to remain comfortable.
I’ve learned the power of trust and the damage it creates when there is broken trust. You need to keep your promises.
If you don’t have people you can trust you waste an extraordinary amount of time and energy chasing after them.
I’ve learned that if you follow an antiquated set of rules, you stifle the change. I believe if everything has to be handwritten, you don’t allow the change to happen.
And most importantly I’ve learned that you have to notice what was already working. Usually things are already moving the direction you want somewhere, it’s a lot easier to build on that than to uproot everything.
Sometimes we don’t have all of the skills we need in order to go where we want to but skills are easy to learn.
Believe in your ability.
Trust in the process.
And keep moving forward.
As Zig Ziglar said, “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can do it better”.
Making change happen almost always starts poorly. But once you start, then you can build.