In a series of articles for World of Learning, best selling author and international behavioural skills consultant Liggy Webb is going to share tips and techniques to help you survive, revive and thrive.

Modern life can, at times, be quite overwhelming and complicated with more change and pressure than most people can handle.  Balancing work and home life, as well as finding time to replenish our own depleting energy reserves can be quite a challenge.  The need, therefore, to be able to cope better, through a range of essential life skills, is fundamental for both physical and emotional wellbeing.

This series of top five tips covers relevant and essential skills and has been designed to keep things simple in a world where we can so easily be bombarded with complexity and information overload.

Change AbilityChange

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change

 – Charles Darwin

The only future thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that there will be some degree of change in all of our lives.  It is inevitable.  You can’t stop it!  You can’t even slow it down or delay it. What you can do, however, with a little knowledge, skill and effort, is to learn how to deal with it.

Everyone reacts differently and some people thrive on change and see it as stimulating and exciting.

Some people, however, can become very stressed and agitated and see change as something that totally destabilises their existence.  Here is some advice that will help you to cope better with change:

Take 5 Tips

  1. Embrace change – In avoiding change, you are wasting precious time being unhappy when you could turn your life around simply by embracing that change instead.  Learning to be flexible and positive will really help
  2. Be open-minded – People who resist change often say ‘Well I tried that before and it didn’t work’.  Every situation is different and just because something didn’t work last time it doesn’t mean it won’t work this time
  3. Prepare your emotions – Accept the fact that you may be emotional during the change process.  In the face of change you may feel unhappy, fearful, insecure, unsettled, frustrated
  4. Challenge your perspective – Sometimes the way you view a situation can be very narrow because you perceive it through your own filter and benchmark it against your previous experiences. It is important to carefully examine the situation from all angles
  5. Chunk up change – If you are dealing with a big change, try to divide this into smaller steps where possible.  When you feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the change, concentrate on the step you’ve reached and what you’ve already achieved, rather than trying to take in the bigger picture all at once

 

Be the change you want the world to be

– Mahatma Ghandi

Read the second article in Liggy’s series for us, here>> Coping With Uncertainty