Managing change by choosing it as a lifestyle …

Whether you like it or not, everything around you is changing.

So are you.

The most ardent resister of change grows older with each passing day.

Your children grow up.

Your dog gets old.

Your clothes and furnishings and haircuts go out of style.

Your town doubles in size.

Technology and how the world connects, works, and interacts is constantly changing.

Simply put, you can cooperate with change — and actually make it work for you — or you can experience change the hard way.

Many choose the hard way.

Kind of like the attitude displayed in the story about a doctor who told a man to give up red meat, so he stopped putting ketchup on his hamburgers.

Instead of being so entrenched against change, you can make change work for you by choosing it, embracing it. Here are a few points about doing that:

– Learn to choose change(s) from your strengths rather than your weaknesses or times of desperation. When you hold out until you absolutely must change, what you get is a necessary step forward rather than potentially having some choices from multiple options that could be good for you. For example, when you remain entrenched against good nutrition and exercise until you doctor tells you to clean up your diet, lose weight, and regularly exercise or lose your health, a minimal response to change will result in a fight just to keep your health. But to choose to change by embracing healthy nutrition and a lifestyle of exercise can provide you with the most robust health and fitness that equips you with the energy and physical ability to engage life at your fullest physical capacity.

_ Most people don’t like to be forced to do anything, and the outcome of what we’re forced into often doesn’t fit well. But when you make changes proactively by choice on an ongoing basis, you put on the best fit for what’s available to you tomorrow. The changes fit well (or at least much better than if forced).

– When you embrace change by choosing to manage it by cooperating with it, then change becomes less drastic and disruptive. Because you’ve been moving with it, change is much more like taking the next step forward in life rather than a giant leap into something alien.

– Make change from wisdom. An obstinate attitude against change in general means you miss seeing wisdom in change, so you wait until things degrade and begin to deteriorate — you wait until your circumstances become negative — instead of acting out of wisdom and proactively step into change to keep a more positive rhythm to your engaging life’s circumstances.

– Make changes because you’re continually learning, and growing from that learning. Intellectual exercises can collect information and gather knowledge, but real learning demands responses and application, and when we respond and apply from a lifestyle of ongoing learning, we grow. Being forced into change usually doesn’t yield the results of positive growth.

– The more you manage change by choosing it as a lifestyle, you minimize the changes that must be made when going through more challenging or difficult times in life because you’ve been tracking with either the need or the wisdom for change. That also means you’ll be better equipped when tougher times yield more difficult changes.

Fighting change is like fighting day turning to night, or the change of weather from one day to the next. Instead of futile battles and self-induced frustration from resisting change, try a more freeing experience of managing change by choosing it with an exercise of wisdom.

Scotty