change ramblings
Introduction
This is about change, stuff that I have heard, dreamt up, tried and even made a difference with. It is a bit more structured than the tweets but don't get your hopes too high.
Change here is taken to be change in behaviour, doing things differently.
This very much 'work in progress'.
What to change
It is all very well being able to change your behaviour but deciding on what to change could be an even bigger issue. Try to change too much and nothing may change at all. You may change something and there may be a knock on which means that you wish you had change nothing. Work on changing one thing and you may decide later that that time would have been better spent on changing something else. Work on making one hard change or spend the same time and energy making 100 easier changes.
So that brings it back to the question of what to change.
Change techniques
1 - Act as if
Sometimes just acting as if something is right, just talking positively that somethings is happening or will happen, can make all the difference. Does this work for sure all the time, no. Does it ever work, well it just might, and if all else has failed then it could be worth a try.
Many of us will have heard the ancient saying:
If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it
But a less well known quote from Yogi Berra fits here even better:
If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it
So if you want to make a change, do a little bit of change work and then consider just acting as if the change has worked could help and perhaps just that little bit of belief will mean that you see things actually start to change.
(There are possibly two points here, act as if and If I hadn't believed .. May be worth splitting it).
2 - Log pile change
Just once in a while I end up out for a walk and go through an area of forestry. From time to time they are chopping the trees down to take away and as part of that process they put them in piles while they are waiting for the lorry to come and take them away. If the log pile is near a footpath there is often a sign beside the pile that says - Don't climb on the log pile". The reason that they put that there is because it just takes one log to move a little and the whole pile can change shape and if you were on that pile at that moment it wouldn't have a very pretty ending.
So a log pile change can happen when just one log is moved a little causing the whole pile to change shape. And so the same sort of change can happen in many situations. Add a new team member and the whole team dynamic can change, add just one extra line to a computer programme and the whole outcome can be different, the flap of a butterflies wings can lead to a hurricane (The Butterfly Effect). And so it could be with a change that you are seeking to make, there could be one tiny action that could make all the difference.
And just knowing that the change may be caused by just one tiny thing could mean that you will see the potential in just one tiny thing and that could make all the difference.
3 - Trundling
Years ago I was mountaineering in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands and ......
4 - Modelling what works
There are many changes that you have made to the way you are, either intentionally or by accident. Some of these changes will have been hard work and taken a lot of time, whilst other changes will have happened effortlessly and instantly. If you looked at changes that happened effortlessly and instantly then you may find some circumstances that helped the change and you may be able to create those same circumstances elsewhere so that other desired changes happen instantly and effortlessly. It might not work for all changes, but working for just some of them would be quite helpful.
An example in here would be great - perhaps the beard one, but what was the circumstance that helped that happen...
5 - Thinking it through
Just thinking things through can be a great change technique. There may be several parts to it such as justifying to yourself as to why the change is a sensible one, thinking through the behaviour that you would like and when you would like it. Being aware of what benefits it might bring you. All conscious thought processes and all potentially helpful.
Making it all work
Develop your ability your ability to make changes then work on the right things.
Developing your ability
Start on that you would like to change but that aren't massively important, complicated are hard, in other words something to have an early success on, then build up slowly to more important things.
The rest is even more 'work in progress' than the jottings above.
