Hello. Thanks for stopping by. If you would like to learn more about personal and organizational change, why not subscribe to the RSS feed. Or, if you're old school, Bookmark This Site

Over the past few days, I’ve read some material that has gotten me thinking about the single moment in time when we make a choice to change.

LindaF recently commented on my Putting It All Together post:

A major turning point in my life was when I decided to quit my job as an assistant coach for a community college athletic team.

It was a rapid change rather than a gradual one. The head coach I worked for was emotionally unstable and verbally abusive. It had come to a point where I found that I spent a lot of my time and energy as a mediator, smoothing over situations where she had acted out of line with players, parents and coaches.

Sometimes I feel like I could have handled my resignation in a more “professional” manner (I packed up at an out of town tournament and got a flight out), but I don’t regret my decision to leave at all.

That was definitely a rapid change and reminded me of the guy who left AmeriCorps in the middle of the night. Then I read the Threshold of Tolerance thread over at Steve Pavlina’s forums which discusses ways to reach the “threshold” where a situation just isn’t tolerable anymore to hurry change along. I began to consider the idea that more uncomfortable a situation is, the quicker we will change it. It’s a bit like the old story of the frog in a pot of boiling water. In the version I’ve heard, if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and gradually heat it up, the frog will just stay there until it cooks. However, if you put a frog in a pot of water that is already boiling, it will jump out right away.

The moments in my life where I have been only vaguely unhappy (like when I suffered through confirmation class in 8th grade) have been easy to get used to. When I have been truly upset or miserable (like when a potential employer hit on me in a job interview!) I have been able to act quickly and decisively.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. Maybe, in order to be at our most efficient and effective when it comes to change, we need to suffer more!

Huh.