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For some people, my last post Suffer More to Change Faster might be a little bit of a downer. After all, suffering is pretty unpleasant, even if it leads to a good place in the end. Fortunately, suffering isn’t the only emotion that can inspire rapid change.

Excitement is the B-side of Suffering. When you are suffering, things are so bad that you just have to change. When you are excited, the future holds so many possibilities that you can’t help but change to make those real.

Comfort is Still the Enemy
No matter how you look at it, nobody wants to change when they are curled up at home in their snuggly pajamas with a cup of hot chocolate! When you are excited, you may not be unhappy, but you are certainly “wound up” and ready for action. That is very different from the type of contentment that a cat napping in a sunbeam feels. Just give a cat a little catnip to see a good visual representation of true excitement.

To change, you have to want things to be different than they are right now. That desire can come from a negative place, but it can also come from a very positive place. For example, I recently read the 4-Hour Workweek and was super inspired by the premise of the book. (In case you’ve been living under a cyber-rock, the book is about freeing yourself from the 9-5 grind through automatic wealth generation, among other things.) Now I’m exploring several ways of going about this very process because I want a radically different lifestyle than the one I am currently living. That comes out of a positive place, but it’s still based in a certain amount of dissatisfaction of my current life.

Create Excitement to Create Change
There are many times that we experience an initial rush of excitement, only to have it fade away. Then we get comfortable again and continue on the same path that we want to change. To me it seems absolutely essential to maintain and even grow excitement over time to use it successful as a change tool. Here are a few techniques that I have found effective in keeping my excitement high.

1. Use Visualization. Imagine the future that you want, as far out in time as you want to take it. Really focus and imagine as many details as possible. If you’d like create a backward storyline that follows the steps you took to get to that future. Repeat your visualization first thing in the morning, or whenever you need a motivational boost.
2. Read and Listen to Motivational Materials. I listen to a lot of podcasts and internet radio that I find motivational or inspirational in some way. Other people gain motivation by reading the stories of people who have accomplished amazing things. Still others watch movies that get their blood pumping. (Fight Club seems to be popular for this :shrug:)
3. Go to a Concert or Sporting Event. Sounds silly, but it works for me. If I’m feeling pretty blah about my life and my goals, I can get my energy up by going to a really great concert and taking in the energy of the crowd. Some people respond better to sports or plays. I think the key is that the event has to have a good sized crowd with really positive energy. Or maybe I’m just a human leech!

Actually, I’m really pumped up just from writing this article. Maybe I should add 4. Try to Help Other People Get Excited!

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.

After making the decision to change, the next step in the Sliding Scales of Change process is to decide the speed at which to implement the change. For some changes, “fast, like a Band-Aid!” is the most appropriate. At other times, slow and steady will indeed win the race. Here are some criteria for choosing a pace for your change.

Is it a Crisis?
In a time of true crisis, such as a natural disaster, hostile takeover attempt, or serious health problem, rapid change may be the only viable option. The caveat here is that many situations can be perceived as a crisis when they are actually long-term issues that may have just boiled to the surface. In American society, especially, we tend to declare issues a “crisis” to try to catalyze rapid change. When this technique is used too often, people can develop change fatigue and become resistant to all types of change.

Magnitude of Change
Generally, the more complex a change is, the more time it will take to implement effectively. This is quite obvious on an organizational level. Complex software implementations or company wide reorganizations can take years to implement. A smaller change, such as cross-training within departments might be feasible on a very rapid schedule.

How Much Previous Change
For people or organizations that have had to incorporate many changes in the recent past, change fatigue might have set in. If that is the case, a slower pace may be necessary. In a department that has been reorganized to report to a different division head, then been cross-trained on new jobs, then had to adapt to a new ERM system all within a year or two, even a small change might be too much to integrate quickly. Time, training, and mental preparation all become more necessary as complexity and overload increase.

Resistance to Change
The more resistant a person or organization is to change, the longer it will take to change successfully. Some organizations have a culture of change and can switch tactics and strategies very quickly with very little pain. On the surface, it seems like age and openness to change are negatively correlated. In general, the older we get as individuals or as work teams, the less adaptable we are. This means that any change process will take longer, cause more pain, and have less chance for a successful outcome. Adjusting the pace to make the process as easy as possible will increase the chances for success.

What Feels Right
Regardless of all of the other considerations involved, sometimes a certain pace of change just feels right. As an example, I have an uncle who smoked for at least 20 years. He decided one day that he wanted to quit smoking - and he did right then. He claims to this day that he has only had one physical craving for a cigarette since then, when he was training a new semi-truck driver in a Chicago snowstorm!

A Personal Example
When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to become a vegetarian. I wasn’t conceiving of this as a 30-day-trial or other temporary experiment. I wanted to stop eating meat immediately and never eat meat again. One day I just decided to quit eating meat.

That lasted about 3 days.

I realized that becoming a vegetarian was too large of a change for me to handle all at once. To be successful, I needed to educate myself about nutrition and food preparation issues; speak to my family about my decision; develop strategies for dining out in the American Midwest; and explain to my grandmother that I would not die immediately by skipping the pot roast at dinner.

After considering all of this, I decided to transition to vegetarianism in a very gradual way, by giving up one type of meat each year. Year 1 was pork, Year 2 was beef, Year 3 was chicken/turkey. Eventually I had eliminated and found substitutes for all the types of meat from my old diet. In my case, a setting of about 2 on the sliding scale was the most effective.

No matter what level of change you are working at, there are many different approaches you can take. I like to think of the differences as being like the sliders on a stereo EQ control. When tweaking settings for sound, different types of music require different adjustments. Some music sounds best with the bass turned all the way up. Some sounds better when the mids are emphasized.

It is the same with change processes. For some situations, neither a 1 or a 10 is the best option. Instead, an optimal solution lies somewhere along the scale, or in some combination of several scales. For other situations, nothing but short of total commitment to one extreme will work.

There are many dualities to choose among when picking an approach to change, but I want to focus on three in particular. Each is defined below, but I will be devoting individual posts to each pair.

Change vs. Accept It As It Is
The first choice we all have to make is whether a situation should change at all. This may seem obvious, but in some situations it is easy to sit at a 5 and never make a choice at all. In future posts I’ll discuss some research that suggests that it doesn’t really matter what choice you make here, as long as you are committed to the choice and don’t second guess yourself.

Rapid vs. Gradual
After making the decision to change, the next choice is often how much time to devote to the change. In some situations, such as a crisis, extremely rapid change is the only viable option. Often, though, a moderate pace is appropriate.

Many factors go into determining an optimal pace for change. A short list includes: size of the change; amount of change prior to and after the change; and resistance to the change. The full range of the slider can be used on this one!

Creative Destruction vs. Recombination
I take these terms from Change Without Pain by Eric Abrahamson. Creative destruction is the idea of tearing everything down and starting from scratch. Recombination, as the term suggests, implies moving pieces of an existing structure around and creating as little disruption as possible. Huge, revolutionary change processes try to hit a 10 on the creative destruction scale. In the opposite paradigm, the Bottle House is an extreme example of recombination.

So now you know of three ways to tweak a change process. In future posts, I’ll go into more detail about each. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and experiences with dualities and change in the comments.