This article is part 1 of a 3-part series on the process of change
Part 1: The consistency of change
Part 2: Finding your change pattern
Part 3: Taking the red pill
It was Heraclitus, the famous Greek philosopher, who coined the phrase Panta Rhei, or “The only constant is change”.
Indeed, life itself is change, yet even today, 2500 years after the time of Heraclitus, contemporary researchers still know very little about some of the most fundamental questions concerning change: Why do we change? How do we change? and What is the outcome of change?
In an effort to find more answers I interviewed executives on their most significant transformational moments in life and was surprised to find out that change is not what it seems at first glance.
While we tend to believe that the transformations we go through in life are erratic and unpredictable, from the interview data I collected it would seem that each one of us has a propensity towards a single pattern of change. What was even more interesting is that every executive tended to have a unique underlying theme that actually triggered or induced their changes. But before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s go back to where it all begun.
More than a decade ago, I decided to make my own transformational leap and quit my job as an IT project manager to begin facilitating, teaching, and coaching people on transforming their careers and lives for the better. While helping people “make the switch” in their lives, I realized that the existing change models, while very helpful, are not complete. Although I knew something was amiss, I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Last year I decided to finally go deeper into the rabbit hole of change and see where the path leads me. I didn’t know it back then, but I was in for a ride…
My goal was to find why executives (and people in general) change and the motives, reasons, and stories behind the changes that transformed their lives. Yet, after endless hours of interviews, I still felt like something was off.
I accumulated many stories of transformations. Some shared stories of quitting a job, being fired from one or opening a new business. Others experienced divorce, birth, adoption or marriage. Some were dealing with health issues or conflicts with family members, colleagues or parents, while others struggled with depression, burnouts, suicide attempts or near-death experience. These stories were all profoundly transformative, at times exciting and sudden, at times, gradual and mundane. Some were sad, others were traumatic, and yet each one was so different that no existing map or model of change I knew could encapsulate all of them.
But then it dawned on me, that was the problem! The existing change models1 are based on the implicit assumption that change is universal, and everyone changes in the same manner. But are we all really that similar when it comes to change?
Click here for Part 2: Finding your change pattern
1Examples of current change models reviewed are: The Transtheoretical Model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1986), Personal Growth Initiative (Robitschek, 1998), The Assimilation Model (Stiles et al., 1990) , Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale (Stiles 2005), Perceptual Control Theory (Powers, 2005), Post-Traumatic Growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996) , Non-Linear and Discontinuous Patterns of Change in Psychotherapy (Hayes et al., 2007).
