The Sunday Mail
CHANGE, inspire or expire.
Adapt yourself to circumstances and play to the music that is airing, not the one you wish was playing. Time does not change things, you do. If you do not, you will be waiting in limbo for a long time. Life is a constant balancing act. You have to keep re-adjusting yourself to the prevailing reality and not the reality you wish for.
Brutal facts can be brutal for those who refuse to change. Waiting does not change anything, all it does is make you old. The price of waiting and doing the same things that you know do not work is far higher than the price of change.
In times of change, learners inherit what those who are stuck in the past ignore. Refusing to change is like dying. Surrender is not a preferred posture for those changing and charging forward. Not all change will bring improvement, but without change there can be no improvement. Target your laser beam of change to every area of your life, family, work and business. Refuse to live among the living dead, who will not do anything to change anything but simply exist.
Change happens
There was a time when life and business were like playing the beautiful game of soccer. Everyone knew the rules and the game was predictable. The match officials had their clear roles and rules to enforce; and so you knew how everything operates. Success was possible, easy and achievable and you had your heroes and all seemed set. Suddenly you turned up on match day, kitted and ready to play and as the whistle blew, you found that the field was now different, the ball was now bigger and differently coloured. Instead of the game being soccer it was now basketball. No one had told you the rules had changed and it looks like the field of play, the officials and those counting the score were all behaving funny. It was all unsettling.
Becoming ignorant, where you thought you were a connoisseur is an affliction. Silence your inner know-it-all. You knew the past, very well. You have to be comfortable with not knowing it all for you to grow. You had honed the skills of the old game, you had perfected the soccer ball control skills, except that this time, what you had mastered by foot was being played by hand. In time you caught on because sometimes change does not give you the option of obsolescence.
You started playing by the new rules and thought you had mastered the new game in town. Whatever change you get, is only valid for a season, because change is the law of life.
You now had new heroes and everything was getting a little familiar, until one day you turned up ready to play basketball only to find that the game was now chess and you had to play on many chessboards at the same time, with multiple-pieces and moves to consider simultaneously. How we all wish change was simple. This allegory signifies the familiar experiences with change. Nothing changes like change. You have to learn to adapt and thrive in the waters you find yourself swimming in.
Take time to reflect
Change can be unsettling and the speed of yesterday will not serve you today when you are navigating a different terrain, using a different vehicle and going through unfamiliar territory. Take time to think and to reflect. Do not use your emotions for thinking, else you will say and do a lot that you will regret in time. Take time to watch what is happening, sometimes one look, one view or one mind is not sufficient. Change is risky, but it also brings new opportunities that you may not have thought of or even imagined. Never let the pressures of today boil what matters out of your soul. Thinking time is not wasted time. Reflecting is idleness. Find the noise-less space in the noise of your world.
Take charge of the dialogue
There is some dialogue that is always at play. People around you are always talking and advising. Refuse to be cheated out of your dreams by the noise around you. Never allow the negative voices drown the dreams that are throbbing in your heart. Never let the voices outside you be louder than those in you. Silence the skeptics around you that say you cannot do it. Sometimes when you do not know, what you do not know, you can do what other people did not know that you do not know. Be intelligently ignorant and ignore the yanking voices of nay-sayers.
People will always speak, so long as they have mouths and phones. They will try to tell you that all the great opportunities have been snapped up and the world is unfair. They will suggest that where you are there are no opportunities. In reality, the world changes every second and opportunities are always being born by the second. Tired eyes sometimes cannot see new opportunities and realities. New opportunities are blowing in all directions and begging for takers. Fresh opportunities are emerging that have never been there before. The future is not being created in the image of the past, except in museums. Silence the voices of the expired, for they see problems only when teeming opportunities are up for grabs by the bold and daring. Take change of your inner dialogue. Refuse to listen to the demons that whisper doubt and fear into your heart. Do that which you fear.
In times of change you cannot continue doing the old and familiar. Try something new that is slightly scary. You cannot grow doing life by tired means. Think differently in order to do differently. Uncertainty will always be there but that gives you a grace-margin. Use powerful affirmations to strengthen your inner will. Use pictures to fertilise your imagination and dreams. Dare you to `1 attempt the impossible. Go where you have never been and do what you have never done. You will never learn how to swim if you keep at the debating at the edge of the pool. Jump in. It is in trying that you learn. It is in attempting that you grow and it is action that greatness is achieved.
The skin and the bottle
Shed your old skin, it will not serve you for ever. Your problems of yesterday will not go away so long as you keep using the solutions of yesterday. Choose to discard the clutter and junk.
Discard physical clutter, tired ideas, imprisoning habits and old routines. Cast off the burdens of the past that weigh you down. Refuse to be limited by the beliefs that no longer serve you. Life will always present you with many opportunities to change and grow until your last breath.
If you can still breathe, you can still change, grow and glow.
Put water in any bottle, whatever the shape, it will adjust immediately to the shape of the bottle. Be like water. Adapt to the circumstances that you find yourself in and stop wishing for the past that will never come and other people’s situations that you will never have.
Milton Kamwendo is a cutting-edge international transformational and inspirational speaker, author and coach. He is a strategy and innovation consultant and leadership coach. His life purpose is to inspire people to release the greatness trapped in them. He can be reached at: [email protected] and on Whatsup at: 0772422634.
