GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY: It's Not about Happy!

Happy Monday Kids…

I want to close out month 5 of this blog by quoting the Seussian-style poem that I wrote for my first blog on my birthday:

I’m 60, and 60’s a beautiful time; I’m living the dream, and can say it in rhyme. I’m not without problems. I’m not without frets. I’m not without challenges, ailments, or debts. But I realized something at age 48, that has grown in me stead’ly since that crucial date. What if life’s more than simply a circumstance state?

Do you guys understand what it means?  Do you?

I’ve gone full circle here because today is the last post about change, and in some ways, it may be my most important insight on the topic;

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAPPY.

What the heck does that mean? Permit me a moment to slip into trainer mode.

Take a look at this graphic … I use it when training people about the stages of change. In many ways, it looks like the grief-cycle.

If we drill down a bit and include emotional states then the graphic fills in with some details that can be helpful in understanding what happens inside a human being when

change happens. The main point here is that unless a person has a brain dysfunction, every human goes through this full cycle … covering every single emotion … with virtually every change.

Change is what happens externally to us. The main truth about change is that it’s inevitable. Transition is the inner response to change. It is personal (different from what other people experience) and it is always emotional (can’t be avoided). Now the speed at which we work through the curve depends on us. This is where the personal-management stuff comes in and all the things we’ve discussed earlier this month.

When I myself was being trained on this subject I picked up this next graphic … and it’s the one that provided my biggest AHHA! moment. It shows the full-detailed emotions and thoughts of someone, typically in an organization, that is going through change, beginning with simply their thoughts about change through to 3 different outcomes. Look at it closely and then I’ll discuss a few key things.

The 3 different emotional outcomes are nicely depicted here:

First you have the people who are disillusioned and ultimately scared-off by change and end up escaping; they deal with it by taking the “flight” path.

Second you have the people who don’t have the guts to leave but they also don’t work through the curve emotionally, on the inside … so they remain … but they remain as a martyr or an enemy.

Third you have the “proper” path of transition where the person works through the emotions and emerges out the other end in what is referred to as “moving forward.

When I teach through this graphic I conclude by asking people, “was there anything in this image that surprised you?”  90% of the responses are the same response that I had when I first saw it; Happiness is not at the end of the middle “proper” path. In fact, it’s almost near the beginning of the transition-journey. The 10% who are not at all surprised by this are usually seniors. Life has already taught them this truth. I believe though that this is important to learn before you reach those years so that the entire tenor of your life will be different. Better!

Now both of you are smarter than me (ie: more raw intelligence). But this has nothing to do with IQ … this is completely about emotional intelligence and seeing the wisdom in this graphic. In an organization, sometimes things deteriorate and change is needed. Typically, the troops know this long before the leaders do, and people are hungering for change. The people might even be pushing hard on the leaders and demanding that things change. So when change is actually afoot and people get a sense that it’s going to happen, they get a sense of relief that, “finally, things are going to change around here.” They get a sense of happiness that life will unfold better and they even get a bit excited about it. But in almost all cases, when the changes actually start rolling out, they are never exactly what people had in mind and disengagement, disillusionment and discouragement come very easily.

However, when people marshal their own inner expectations and responses and cognitively move themselves through the curve, the journey to “acceptance” can come quickly (or at least quicker) so that they are not being crushed by the changes. It’s only then that they can actually “move forward” in their life and not be held-back emotionally by the changes that have happened (or continue to happen).

The goal of managing yourself through change is NOT to get to a state of happiness. This is an error that children make. The problem is that far too many people grow into adulthood while still carrying this childish emotional expectation. This becomes a huge dysfunction in their life.

The goal of managing yourself through change is so that you can move forward. Happiness is a mental state that comes through choice about how we interpret life’s circumstances. Happiness is by-product of choosing to move forward.

Much of that third diagram applies to most changes. But when we employ it with extreme situations such as the changes that result from the loss of loved ones or the loss of a job or the loss of good health, it becomes pretty clear that “happiness” is not waiting for us at the end of the curve. We need to deal with and “accept” the new reality so that we can “move forward” one again and live life effectively and productively rather than remaining stuck in an emotional valley.

My Dad died in an emotional valley … the place where he got stuck when his job situation changed. My sister-in-law Nancy died in an emotional valley … the place where she got stuck when Sidney died from diabetic complications at age 42. I’ve worked with dozens of people, and tried helping hundreds of others through training, who have become stuck somewhere in their journey through the curve (which we go through hundreds, if not thousands of times in our life). Your Mom’s big focus in the counselling she offers is to help people get unstuck from wherever they are in the curve … so that they can be free to move forward once again.

Charles Darwin wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Darwin was right … survival is about adaptability; it is about quickly assessing when reality has changed and adapting to the new reality in order to continue moving forward once again. When the road changes direction, only a foolish driver continues driving straight. That will get you killed. I don’t mean to make this sound melodramatic, but having a low adaptive capacity can kill you.

This becomes much much clearer when we realize that our goal is to get through change so that we can move forward, not to be happy. I was NOT HAPPY that I lost a year of university to illness … but I had to move forward. I was NOT HAPPY when each of my parents, my grandmother and my brother died … but I had to move forward. I was NOT HAPPY when I had serious curves thrown at me during my career … but I was able to move forward because I worked my way through the only curve that mattered: the one that ended with “moving forward.”

I love you guys. See you next month when I talk about my personal crap detector.

Dad