Seeing Through Change

by Ian Percy

During a consultation with an optometrist you will put your face against a machine called an auto-refractor. The doctor will flip various lenses in front of each eye asking constantly, "Does this make it clearer or worse?"

The application of the metaphor comes easily. We'll just use a Life Chart instead of an eye chart. Does your job make your ability to see what is really important, clearer or worse? Flip. Did your parents make your vision of the world clearer or worse? Flip. How about the lens of education? Flip. What contribution has your marriage made to your vision? Flip. How about the promotion you got last year? Flip. Your own heart attack? Flip. What did going through the re-engineering project do to you? Flip.

Change is simply a combination of such lenses. These change lenses are positive factors in our lives only if we can see through them to something beyond the lens itself. If the lenses are smudged and dirty we start to focus on them rather than on what they were meant to reveal to us. We start to look at the lens rather than through it and end up in a lot of stress.

Many lenses are available to you. Accounting lenses and medical lenses. Lenses for artists and homemakers. A being laid off lens and a being hired lens. Another if you're a man and another if you are a woman. There is one for poverty and one for wealth. Not one of these lenses is an end in itself. Each is simply a viewpoint through which to get a glimpse of the landscape beyond. Change always reveals something beyond itself.

Some of the lenses of our lives make things clearer in the spiritual sense, while others fog and cloud both our out- sight and in-sight. We need to learn how to positively impact the ratio of the two.

It's a spiritual version of what the Endeavour astronauts had to do for the ailing Hubbell space telescope. In addition to installing gyroscopes to keep things in balance, they replaced the Wide Field Planetary Camera so the telescope could see and record things more clearly. That's what we need -- a Wide Field Planetary Camera for our personal and corporate souls. Come to think of it, we may need a gyroscope too.

Change is the opportunity of a lifetime, learn to see through it.

Change

"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change." - Jim Rohn

"Slowness to change usually means fear of the new." - Philip Crosby

“Just as the tumultuous chaos of a thunderstorm brings a nurturing rain that allows life to flourish, so too in human affairs times of advancement are preceded by times of disorder. Success comes to those who can weather the storm.” -- I Ching No. 3

“If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.” -- Norman Vincent Peale

Don't avoid the void

"When we feel stuck, going nowhere -- even starting to slip backward -- we may actually be backing up to get a running start." -- Dan Millman

To change, we must go through a transition zone. It's not easy being in transition. Thoughts, beliefs and habits are all in flux. It can create a sense of groundlessness, of being in a void that can be quite uncomfortable.
When we’re in the void, our first impulse will be to revert to old habits because they feel comfortable. Our goal is to hang in there until the change is complete. Knowing that TRANSITIONS ARE PART OF THE CHANGE PROCESS helps us muster the courage to put up with the discomfort, the uneasiness, the void.
Change requires a letting go of what we’ve always known and done to allow in something new. We need to trust ourselves and higher forces to unfold a new reality for us.

"Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception." -- Dan Millman

Change

“I can change. I can live out my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past.” -- Stephen Covey

Change is hard

Howard Gardner when asked: "Why do you think it is so hard to bring about change? Answered……

Gardner: "I think it's hard to change people, especially when they've been doing things for a long period of time, and feel that they're doing a reasonable job, and they're pretty unaware that they could do things differently. And, as Al Shanker points out, there isn't very much positive incentive for change. People have to want to change, but it's not like you get any rewards. In fact, often when you try to change things become more difficult and it's easier to go back to what you've done before. So I think that in the absence of compelling models of how things could be different and incentives for people to want to be different it's much easier for people to just stay with what they've been doing. I think that until you have a situation in which people really feel that they want to do things differently, that they feel they'll be rewarded for doing that, that the country cares, … the stakeholders" care, I think it's going to continue to be an uphill battle."

Change, according to Fullan

Change in our own perspectives on leadership, according to Fullen, Dean of Educational Studies at the University of Toronto, is what’s worth fighting for: "not system change, not change in others around us, but change in ourselves."

His ten guidelines—all working together to create his prescription for individual action are listed below:
Avoid "if only" statements, externalizing the blame and other forms of wishful thinking.
Start small, think big. Don’t over-plan or over-manage.
Focus on fundamentals: curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional culture.
Practice fearlessness and other forms of risk taking.
Embrace diversity and resistance while empowering others.
Build a vision in relation to both goals and change processes.
Decide what you are not going to do.
Build allies.
Know when to be cautious.
Give up the search for the "silver bullet."

He says we need this in order to survive as new demands appear daily for accountability, teacher appraisal, program initiatives—you name it. Meanwhile, not one "old" responsibility goes away. When asked, "Do you think the principal can effectively fulfill all the responsibilities assigned to him/her?" 91% of US principals responded, "No." Why are we not surprised? But that dark point is exactly where hope begins to shine, Fullen argues. "There is no point in lamenting the fact that the system is unreasonable, and no percentage in waiting around for it to become more reasonable. It won’t." He says that true school leaders will reframe their role to design continuous learning for everyone in the school organization.