Embracing change can unlock a world of growth and opportunity for you. Because to become comfortable with change is to make oneself comfortable with life.
Change happens in every moment. And most of the time, it’s outside of your control. So the sooner you learn to embrace it, the sooner you can start reaping its benefits.
In this post, you’ll learn 6 ways to embrace change positively in the workplace, in life, and in relationships with concrete examples and quotes.
Let’s dive in.
6 Ways to Embrace Change
1. Understand the Law of Constant Change
The first step to embracing change is to understand that change will happen whether we like it or not.
It is only natural to crave stability in this fast-paced world of ours. But when you understand the nature of reality it becomes very obvious that change is the only constant.
You can never step in the same river twice. – Zen saying
Everything is in the process of becoming something else. All life is movement and change. our health, our relationships, our finances, our place of residence, our careers, our spiritual understanding, our beliefs, and our most cherished principles, all are presently changing and will continue to go through numerous changes.
You will change whether you want to or not. You cannot and will not remain the same. It is the cosmic dance of change and movement, and understanding the nature of our reality can assist us to be more in harmony with the process.
This is the law of constant change and the truth of who we are. Accepting and understanding this is to transform our lives.
2. Embrace the Journey
The law of constant change says there is no arrival. Or to be more exact, one arrives at one point only to immediately leave for another. There is no stability, only movement.
Yet most people live their lives focusing on some arrival point. A happy marriage, financial security, a fulfilling career, abundant health, and spiritual awakening. However, all the above are not only arrival points, but departure points as well.
Understanding this is the key to a fulfilling life, for we need to constantly realign ourselves toward enjoying the journey and embracing change as the vehicle of that journey.
Embracing change takes recognizing change as an integral part of the journey – something to enjoy, not “get past”.
3. Initiate Change
If life cannot and will not remain the same, then why not be the initiator of the changes, rather than letting life impose the changes upon us with some crisis? This is not to say that we can avoid crises and uncertainty in general in our lives, but these will undoubtedly be less frequent and dramatic if we form the habit of initiating change regularly.
When a marriage goes bad it doesn’t happen overnight. There were signs. Poor Health? Again, it’s unlikely that it came like a thief in the night, although it can come like that too. But chances are that your choices and actions have helped bring poor health to you. Financial problems don’t appear out of thin air; there are patterns in one’s life that attract them.
Learn to read the signs and act. Be fearless in initiating change, and don’t be afraid to close chapters in your life.
Life is made up of many chapters. Chapters need to be closed before new ones appear. Close the chapter of being overweight and sluggish. Close the chapter of struggling financially. Close the chapter of being angry with a parent or hurt by a sibling.
Any decision backed by action will create change in your life, and change is almost always good if we are the initiators and we initiate after looking within.
4. Look Forward to Change
Whenever someone says to me they are going through a midlife crisis, I always respond: “How wonderful!” and I mean it. How wonderful that, at your midpoint in life, your psyche shakes you up and demands that you look at your life, your values, and your goals. It makes you re-examine everything.
Midlife crises are never enjoyable. They are terrifying and confusing (assuming that you’re having a half-decent one). But they are always valuable. Always.
We have to change our patterns of reacting to experience. For our problems do not lie in what we experience but in the attitude we have towards it. – Akong Rimpache
When you come out the other side you have a clearer sense of what is important and what is not. It’s like a rebirth, a second chance. What a wonderful thing to happen at this stage of your life. Otherwise, you might end up like the man who climbed the ladder of success only to discover he was up against the wrong wall.
The same is true of any change you might be going through. If you can start seeing change as a new beginning rather than the end of something, you will open yourself up to opportunities.
5. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
Comfort is the enemy of change. Why change when things are nice and comfortable?
But life knows how to get us to change when we’re stuck in a rut or not moving as we should. Discomfort, tragedy, illness and misfortune, though always unpleasant, are all wonderful sources of change and movement.
Sometimes it’s the carrot and sometimes it’s the stick, but if you do not make the changes that are needed in your life, life will make them for you. Make no mistake, you are called to act upon your life.
Embracing change is like any other skill: the more you practice it, the better you’ll become at it. Learn to embrace change by regularly stepping out of your comfort zone. Welcome fear, take a leap, and trust the outcome.
6. Say Yes to Life
Being rigid, fearing and fighting change, whether the change is internal or external, is doomed to failure. The better approach is to jump into life and appreciate the flow and movement.
There can’t be a crisis next week, my schedule’s already full. – Henry Kissinger
Say yes to life. Jump into the river of life and say yes. Flow effortlessly and gloriously along, saying yes to the flow.
Yes to the rapids. Yes to the dark mysterious waters. Yes to the stagnant pools and yes to the beauty. Yes to the sharp jagged rocks that sometimes cut and maim. Yes to the shallows where we get stuck. Yes to the strange currents and eddies that take us to unknown parts of the river without us understanding why. Yes to the scenery constantly changing.
Yes to it all as we continue on our way, propelled by a force larger and grander than we can ever hope to understand. Yes to it all.
Why Embracing Change Is Important
Learn and Grow
As the saying goes: if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And change is the precursor of both growth and progress. Embracing change is a wonderful way to expand your comfort zone and develop yourself.
Change exposes you to circumstances you would have otherwise not been familiar with. When you embrace uncertainty, you become more resourceful, expand your knowledge, and build new skills. In other words, embracing change is living life at your full potential.
Live a Richer Life
A life well-lived consists of a myriad of experiences. Goals, ideas, and philosophies will appear, have their time with us, and then morph into something new and different. There will be many destinations, departures, arrivals, countless thousands, no millions of details that cause life to indeed be a complex event. It is necessary to learn how to embrace change if we are to thrive in this reality.
A life without change is flat. We all need a bit of surprise to keep us engaged and feeling alive.
“It is not until the later stages of one’s life that you look back and see that each experience has a symmetry and reason and fits perfectly into the fabric of your life.” – Joseph Campbell
Appreciate—Once Again—What You’ve Taken for Granted
Change often involves loss, permanent or temporary. And loss is great at reminding us what we have to be grateful for.
You may take a relationship for granted until your friend moves to a new town. You may take an item for granted until it breaks. Or you may take your job for granted until your company is forced to lay off half of its workforce.
If you’ve been cruising through life and resting on your laurels, change will remind you to be grateful and humble, and take action to protect the things you value most.
Access New Opportunities
Change is the process by which the new replaces the old. In other words, when we let go of one thing, we make room for another to replace it.
Therefore, embracing change is a fantastic opportunity to upgrade areas of our lives that no longer fulfil us. For example, being let go from a job is an opportunity to get a better job, do something more meaningful, and increase your salary.
Change opens the doors to new opportunities if we dare to embrace it.
