Don’t Change You, Adapt Your Perception

Trish — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:07:30 +0000

This morning I have more questions than answers. I’ve been thinking about change and why everyone, myself included, thinks we need to change something. Maybe we do, but what if we don’t need to. What if we need to stop focusing on change management and instead focus on adapting and accepting what is?

I posed a question on FaceBook over the weekend to friends and family. I asked, “If you could change one thing about your boss, it would be…?”

The overwhelming answer was that the respondent would change themselves and not the boss. I admit, that would have been my answer too. The more I thought about it though, what if you just accept the boss, flaws and all. What if you just accept your family members, your friends, your colleagues for exactly the way they are?

Think about yourself for a moment. Would you say you are happy with the way you look, with your health and fitness, or even the amount of sleep you get? Assume you think you need to lose 10- 20 pounds. What if instead of fretting each day about it, going on diets to lose the weight, then gaining it back again and again, what if you just accepted yourself the way you are? Maybe you are supposed to be that weight. Maybe you are supposed to feel the way you do.

Like I warned you at the beginning, today I have more questions than answers. Are we too driven to change? Can we ever be happy with the way things are? Can you just adapt to what “is”?

This Is It- Accepting Feedback and Adapting

Trish — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:30:31 +0000

I watched ‘Michael Jackson: This Is It’ on the flight back home from London. Beyond being an incredibly entertaining movie, one that showed that Michael was certainly still on top of his game from a singing/ dancing/ performing perspective, something struck me when I watched. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, seventeen time Grammy winner, still practices, and practices, and practices. Even though he’s been doing his job over 45 years.

Are you doing that in your job? Can you really say that you practice and actively work on your skills to ensure that your job “performance” is as good as it can possibly be?

When you watch him, he has to be able to feel what needs to be done. He also takes songs that are 25 years old and reinvents the performance. Michael has directors, choreographers, singing coaches, and producers all telling him what he can do to get better. He misses cues, he pushes back, he is told that he needs to sing certain parts of songs differently. And in order to have a successful performance, HE ACCEPTS THE FEEDBACK and ADAPTS.

Now, here we sit in our jobs, pushing back. We don’t like having a supervisor or coach telling us we don’t do something the way they think will work best. We don’t really want someone coaching us to do better. After several years in our job, we think we’ve mastered it. At least, many employees do.

The older I get and the more seasoned in my career, the more I know without a doubt that I have much more to learn. Different laws, techniques, technologies. I have so much more to give back in my “performance” if I adapt and do it this way. And, I can certainly take knowledge I already have and reinvent it for the present situation. I’m rehearsing every day.

So, it’s SHOWTIME! What are you going to do? Tell me in the comments.

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Don’t Change You, Adapt Your Perception

This Is It- Accepting Feedback and Adapting