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The Best Tool For Dealing With Change Is Listening

Jeff Fox
13 min readSep 3, 2022

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Plugging our ears and trying to shout it down only exhausts us and makes us look silly.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

Change is a daunting and uncomfortable thing, even a change for the better we fully want and have worked for. Change means replacing something known with something new, unfamiliar, and it is a constant in every aspect of our lives from our birth to our death. The most powerful relationship we can have with change is to be a participant, to work with it as a part of it. In order to do that, we have to listen.

The desire for things to stay as they are, to remain as we know them, is a natural impulse. Regardless of how positive or negative a known will always feel safer than an unknown. Our current situation may be incredibly harmful but an unknown brings with it the possibility of even greater harm. Our hardwired survival instincts would much rather know than not, we can at least try to do something about a danger we know is coming at us.

We are contradictory creatures, however. Our Yin needs a Yang. We also innately and persistently desire more and better. We certainly want less of the bad things but we have a natural drive towards wanting more of the good things. The trick is, gaining more of something means change. It is both a change, in and of itself, and it requires change. Doing the same thing in the same way…

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Jeff Fox
Jeff Fox

Written by Jeff Fox

A professional dancer, choreographer, theatre creator, and featured TEDx speaker with an honours degree in psychology, two black belts, and a lap-top.

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