By Books Author Denise Turney

Change is everywhere. It’s this world’s constant which begs a question. Is flexibility to change a key to success? After all, being flexible in business, at play and other life areas can keep you free of disillusion, hopelessness and nagging frustration. And this could help your energy stay balanced and flowing.

Flexibility to Change Associations

Yet, if you have heard that it’s important to learn how to pivot to experience sustained growth, why might you resist change? To start, you might associate change with loss.

For example, if your early experiences with change caused you to feel as if you’d lost what you value, you might choose not  to be flexible and resist change. This may have occurred with me after my mom transitioned when I was a kid. That certainly was my first early experience with a major change. Not only did it feel like a massive, painful loss, I soon learned that it was a change that I could not reverse.

Reasons You Fight Change

Other reasons why you might not want to get flexible and instead fight change include:

• Change ushers in a certain amount of uncertainty. When change arrives, you really don’t know how an experience will fully impact you or turn out.
• People, including family and friends, may perceive you differently. An example of this is when a job layoff occurs and people no longer respect you due to the fact that your work title has changed.
• Past instances of change may have happened after your peers pressured you into doing something. Dislike the outcome of what you did and you could resist change and also think that it’s better not to form close relationships.
• Failure and change could be linked in your thinking. A path of freedom from this could be to start to see failure as a learning experience. Because change in this world is always occurring, failure definitely isn’t permanent.
• Sense of loss of power is another reason why you might resist change. This could happen whether your role in a family, at work, in the community or another environment changes as you age, your children get older, etc.

Change Is Constant

As Heraclitus shared, “the only constant in life is change”. However, rather than accepting that as truth, look around. See if your experiences prove that change is always happening in this world. For a shortcut, you could start with your appearance. Even when you think nothing is changing about your appearance, one day you’ll look up and see just how much change has been occurring to your body second-by-second, day-by-day.

Furthermore, you might notice how often your judgments and opinions change. Let your judgments and opinions change and your mood could shift as well. In fact, depending on your age and how many new experiences you let enter your life, you might discover that it’s tough to hold onto a judgment, opinion or belief.

So, stay open to being flexible. Also, similar to how you stretch in the mornings to get flexible in your body, step into positive experiences that stretch you. Examples range from being flexible at work by taking on projects with elements that are “new” for you to making friends with caring people you’d rarely bothered to say “hello” to.

Mental Flexibility

Vacationing at a different location, building your own furniture, sewing your clothes for a year and serving as the coordinator for next year’s community book festival are other examples of stretching yourself. Each of these experiences offers an element of “newness”. They may require research, speaking with people who you had before chosen not to communicate with and accessing a set of resources you’d previously overlooked.

Regardless of how “stretch” experiences turnout, you’ll learn. And, you’ll grow if you chose to be flexible. Even more, your fears that are associated with change may diminish or go away. That may invite a bounty of good change into your life.

Mental flexibility clearly comes with rewards. It can be the path to breaking bad habits and patterns that once worked but no longer do. Therefore, look for areas in your life where you could insert change. Practice awareness to spot instances when you’ve invested way too much into a rigid, strict way of thinking, feeling or behaving.

Practice Awareness

By practicing awareness, you can catch yourself planning entire days, weeks and months in advance and then becoming angry when events don’t go the way that you think they should. Also, keep in mind that it could take effort and courage to get flexible. Fortunately, to be flexible does not mean that you‘ve changed. Being flexible doesn’t change your personality and core beliefs.

Instead, when you adapt as you make a change, you’re simply adjusting your perception of change. You’re also building courage. This is not to say that being flexible in business or other areas will guarantee success. But it will prove that you can adjust to change. Additionally, it will show you that you’re stronger than any change you could experience.

Get flexible, celebrate change and who knows what good might come into your life. Should the rewards not seem to outweigh the risks, start small. You could do this by setting goals. Then, break the attainment of the goals into small, daily actions. Honor each action that you complete. Actually acknowledge the progress that you’re making..

Celebrate Successes

Another step that might prove beneficial is to track your progress on a spreadsheet. That way you can look back at your efforts and your results midway through the year and at the end of the year. Pay attention to the progress that you’re making, even if the forward change seems small to you.

By tracking your efforts and results, you can spot areas that need to be adjusted sooner. Keep going. It may not be long before you witness the good that you’re creating. Let that happen and you might seek out good change, instead of hiding from change. That’s when you could become the driver of the blessed life that you’ve been longing to live.