Change happens. You cannot stop it. But you can embrace it and make it work in your favor.

Improvement is change. You cannot be part of a culture of continuous improvement without change. As a leader, you need to identify your strengths and weaknesses and start working on strengthening and leveraging your talents, while alleviating your weaknesses.

You can welcome change or resist it. Either way, it will happen. 

Change is perhaps the only constant in the world that surrounds us. One would, therefore, assume that we humans have grown comfortable with it through evolution. However, we tend to resist change. We see it as a threat to a comfortable, stress-free existence.

“It’s not the progress I mind, it’s the change I don’t like” – Mark Twain.

Great leaders, on the other hand, have learned to embrace change. Why do true leaders like change, and how do they adjust their acceptance of it?

Why Should You Embrace Change? 

From the perspective of leadership coaching, you have no choice but to embrace change. It is essential for your survival as a leader.

• By embracing change, you become adaptable, more capable of handling whatever life throws at you.
• It allows you to gain an education and continuously improve it throughout your life.
• For a leader with a proactive attitude, change means opportunity. It opens doors, develops new skills, and creates new knowledge.
• Change opens the path to excellence. Often, a leader may be stuck being “good”. Since he/she is comfortable with that situation, he/she cannot achieve excellence.
• Growing comfortable with change nurtures courage, the willingness to take risks, resilience, and maturity.
• Mature leaders who embrace change view failure as temporary, as well as a valuable learning opportunity.
• Change creates new relationships and improves old ones. It contributes to the development of emotional intelligence, and through it, it enhances self-awareness.
• Leaders who understand change are more likely to chase down their goals. Having a goal is great, but it means nothing without the willingness to follow through on it.

Perhaps most importantly, embracing change gives you some degree of control over it. The impact of an event on your life depends on your reaction to it. Being proactive toward change allows you to control your reaction.

Change is the indispensable ingredient of progress. 

 A person resisting change is always in reactive mode, and thus but a passive sufferer of its consequences.

How do you Embrace Change?

In my books, I have stated that lasting positive organizational change stems from positive behavioral changes in leaders. Thus, leadership coaching aims to teach and encourage leaders to strengthen their inner cores.

To accomplish lasting behavioral change, you have several tools at your disposal.

• Build up your character, belief system, values, self-concept, and your pool of positive references.
• Remove obstacles from the path of progress.
• Bring your collection of positively charged references into focus. Add new references to it that result from the execution of your new behaviors.
• Be an optimist and think positively.
• Take action, even if you can only take small steps.
• Acknowledge your fears, but do not let them dissuade you from embracing change.

Change happens. It is up to you whether it has a positive or negative impact on your life and organization.

Back to blog