Succeeding during change

World is a dynamic place, always happening and ever changing. Change is happening whether one is moving from one place to another, one profession to another, one age group to another, or one position to another, so on and so forth.

Image via Wikipedia

On the one hand, though the change is always exciting and brings freshness into the experience of our lives, yet on the other hand there are certain changes that are less desirable. Still one has to deal with the reality of change in life and learn to tide over it and become successful. So how can we successfully deal with change?

Well, there is one strategy that can always ensure success during change and that is “to change with the change”.

Yes, when the reality is changing around you, you too need to change to cope with it and to succeed. Changing yourself means changing your response to the situation. If the situation is changing then it will not be possible to succeed if our responses remain the same. So the question is how our responses can change and what needs to change to change our responses.


Well, in order to understand how to change our responses it is important to know that why we fail to change the response. We fail to change our response because we always respond from one particular set of values and that becomes a track that we follow all the time.

Friends, though values are good but it may not do us good in every type of situation. The world is a dynamic place and we ought to use different values for different situations while still knowing what we value at a personal level. The reason why we fail to change our response is that if we need to change the track and act from a different plane of value we feel as if we are not being loyal to our present value system. This leads to guilt and this guilt thus stops us from leaving our value and responding from a different plane of value. We do it even at the cost of our own success.

So how can we come out of this guilt trap and respond from the values that can make us successful in dealing with new situations while keeping our own values intact without changing them.

Well, it can be as easy as eating a cake if we only know what our values represent. Friends, our values only represent what we appreciate in life. Like, we may appreciate being physically active and exercising but it can be hazardous if we have a fractured leg. In this situation, certainly if we want a fast recovery it would be best for us to rest, however we may still continue to appreciate exercising, though we may not be living that value.

So it is one thing to have a value and quite another to live it and whether we live it or not depends upon the situation.

However, most of the time we are not aware about this dichotomy between appreciating and living a value. Also, we often have a belief that appreciating must equal to living. This belief keeps us a hostage to guilt. So if you want to succeed in every situation while keeping your values intact you must do the following exercise:

1. Identify what are your values (actions that you would appreciate if you take them) in your work life?

2. Identify if you can really live from these values given your work life situation? What would be the cost to you if you live from these values?

3. Check if you live from your values would the result contradict some of your other values? (You may not like the outcome if you live from your value, as there can be a situation where though you like to act from a value but know for sure that the result would not be good and would in fact be against what you value.) Since the overall effect is not what you would like, you need to leave the option of living from this value. However, you can still continue to appreciate it as an ideal case scenario. This means if everything else would have been ideal then you would have acted from this value.

Extend this exercise to your personal relationships, financial decisions, and personal health.

Doing this exercise will bring you out of the conflict and help you come out of your guilt trap while keeping your values intact.

It is important to note that if we are not flexible in terms of how we treat our values then while our values may survive, we may become extinct soon.

Values are set of norms adopted by us, the conscious beings, for our life and we are not the ones adopted by our values. If living from a particular value brings unhappiness and misery it is not a value that is worth living.