10 minute read
Transformation starts with you recognising you have already transformed.
I get a sense of comfort in realising that we are always changing, growing, developing, evolving … transforming.
Even at those times when I might feel completely stuck in one aspect of life, I know that the experience is only temporary. Just as a new day always follows night, change is continuous.
Change is constantly happening at such vast scales it can sometimes be difficult to recognise that it is actually occurring. For example, the Earth circles the Sun every 365.25 days bringing with it a cycle of changing seasons; and our Universe continues to expand at around 220 light-years per second with endless stars being born and dying each second.
And change is also always occurring at the most minute of scales, too — each breath in and each breath out mark a continuous renewal of the cells in my body. Science has found that approximately 300 million cells in your body die every minute, so in the time it’s taken for you to read this sentence, 50,000 cells in your body have died and been replaced by new ones.
And yet, each breath in and out is more than this, too.
Each breath marks a new opportunity to experience life a-new … to be filled up with life (literally!) and to be changed by that moment’s experience.
For over 20 years I have worked with individuals, teams, organisations and communities as they embarked on a change. Some of those changes were forced — the loss of one’s job, a change in organisation performance or market conditions, the introduction of a different element into a community — and other changes were planned for and undertaken with intention and deep commitment.
And two observations remain true for all of the changes I have experienced:
- First, positive oriented change can sustain momentum for longer and is more likely to succeed than change grounded in negativity; and
- Second, the full extent and impact of those [positive] changes couldn’t be predicted at the beginning of the change journey.
That’s the wonder of change: It always unlocks new potential that wasn’t even considered prior to the completion of that change.
Positive oriented change can sustain momentum for longer and is more likely to succeed than change grounded in negativity.
Of course, not all change should be considered equal and not all change will result in us accessing or realising new potential.
The reason for this is simple: How we interpret the journey of change will result in how we experience the end result of changing. For example, I had two attempts at starting my entrepreneurial adventure — the first could be interpreted as “not successful” because I returned to working for a boss whilst the second was “successful” because I’m still running my own company.
But, I consider them both to be successful starts to my entrepreneurial adventure because both resulted in me learning something new about myself and my own inner resolve. If I hadn’t “failed” at my first attempt I would never have discovered what I needed to learn about myself to be able to commit 100% to the pursuit of my second entrepreneurial adventure.
I’ll write about my own experience commencing my own business later, but the point is this: You can choose how you experience and interpret all of life’s infinite changes and your interpretations make all of the difference. To learn more about what I mean by this point, check out my recent podcast that dove deeply into this important aspect of change (Check out The Positive Change Podcast: S02E09).
But this point isn’t the main focus of this particular piece of writing.
I started writing this article to explore a distinction between change and transformation, and why the journey (and outcome) of self-transformation is so important. You see, you only know you’ve transformed in hindsight … after your life has been turned upside down and you’ve been put together again anew.
And that is what makes change and transformation so different. You CAN plan for change, but you CAN’T be fully prepared for transformation.
Let me tell you what I mean, most change follows a predictable process. For example, let’s say you want to change an unhelpful behaviour like eating too much ice cream at night. Making the change to eat less ice cream is pretty simple:
Step 1: Define the scope of your change, its parameters, and what is in and out of the change
Step 2: Break down the “big change” into lots of little changes — the practical steps to be implemented for the big change to become an inevitability.
Step 3: Start to enact the little changes you’ve identified — after all, change starts when you start to do something different.
Step 4: Keep enacting those little changes to build your momentum, towards your bigger change even when it becomes increasingly difficult to do so
Step 5: Make it hard to stop doing the new behaviour once you start doing it whilst simultaneously making it difficult to continue to do the old (and less healthy) behaviour
Step 6: If/When you regress to the old behaviour, identify where and how your original plan failed, refine the plan to address the issue, and repeat Steps 1–5.
I’ve helped 1000s of people to implement these six steps for some important change and without fail, they have implemented their particular change …
… except when they haven’t.
“Hang on a minute,” you might be thinking, “isn’t successful change the focus of this article?”
Yes, it is but there’s another factor that determined if and how a change is successful and that it is our willingness to transform.
I’ve had the change versus transformation conversation with many people I have worked with over the last decade of supporting people through a transformation at every level of scale, from personal to community-level transformation. And perhaps you have, too.
The real reason not all changes are successfully implemented is because the person (or group of people) pursuing that change fails to take into account the larger transformation needed to make that change stick.
While change connotes the implementation of several finite and definable initiatives that may or may not affect the whole “system in focus” (i.e., one’s life as a whole, an organisation, a market, a community, etc), transformation focuses on a portfolio of interdependent or intersecting initiatives that aims to reinvent the “system in focus” as a whole.
Let me put this point another way by making it more personal.
Making a change can be focused (or constrained) to only impact one part of your overall life. For example, wanting to get fitter to change your body shape.
Making a change can be focused (or constrained) to only impact one part of your overall life. For example, wanting to get fitter to change your body shape. But, a personal transformation will impact every. single. aspect. of. your. life. For example, you may decide to get fitter so that you can lose a few kilos, but then your newfound energy results in you wanting to change your job, engage in different life activities and (perhaps even) change your life living arrangements that ultimately affect who and how you are in a relationship with other loved ones.
Transformation is NEVER piecemeal.
Sometimes we see to make a change in one aspect of our lives when the real need is for transformation.
Sure, lots of changes can lead to a transformation because change builds momentum, but a transformation is more than just a lot of little changes.
Transformation is much more unpredictable, and as such, involves significantly higher risk. To be even more clear, change initiatives can be included within a transformation, but not the other way around.
And this is what makes transformation a challenging phenomenon to fully understand: You only know you’ve transformed in hindsight.
Why, because it is through the passing of time that we observe that we have transformed.
The process of change is also a process of comparison (i.e., the form of something at one moment in time versus another moment in time), but it’s the scope and scale of transformation that is under observation.
Of course, by not entering the stream of time itself in our Awareness we can fast track a transformation (it can happen in an instant), but that is an article for another time (time pun intended!).
The thing to recognise is that although change can be planned for, a transformation can’t and can only be understood in hindsight.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. In mid-2006 whilst undertaking my PhD, I completed a projective assessment of my stage of identity/ego development called the Washington Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT). Basically, the assessment consists of 36 open sentence stems that I was asked to complete.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but the assessment invited me to project my internal self meaning-making structures onto each sentence stem. A skilled scorer then assessed each of my 36 responses according to adult developmental frameworks and I received a report detailing my current stage of identity development and a series of recommendations for how to continue my own identity development.
I have completed this same assessment on four subsequent occasions since 2006 with each completion acting as a “marker” of my own developmental progress since that time. What’s interesting about the WUSCT (or its variants) is that each stage of identity development is also a marker of a person’s transformation as each stage of development heralds a quantifiably different (and more complex) sense of Self.
One of the sentence steps in the assessment commences with the prompt “I am …” and following is how I responded to that prompt on the five seperate occasions I have completed this assessment:
I am …
- (2006) able to be anything I want to be in my life. I am also able to overcome any challenge that may arise.
- (2014) a being of light offering a unique expression of Source for those I engage with both directly and indirectly; and a beacon of hope for myself in those times when the realisation that hope is just an illusion becomes too great.
- (2018) unconditional and unfiltered love for all, through all, with all, and from all.
- (2020) the timeless, boundless stillness that lights time and space immemorial.
- (2022) Light and Stillness through which ALL manifests.
Without going into the details of how each of these responses is quantifiably different, I’m sure you can identify that how I am understanding myself and my ‘orientation’ towards Self is quite different in 2022 compared to the first time I completed the assessment in 2006.
The key consideration as you continue to engage in your own transformational journey is establishing markers that can serve as a reminder that you have and continue to transform.
“Why track my transformations?” you may ask.
So that you can celebrate your successes, continue to learn from them and reuse them to ground and inspire future transformations.
Celebrating your successes in becoming more adaptable and responsive to life's many challenges (because this is what engaging in continuous transformation gives you) is at the core of realising your best life. Building self-efficacy and realising that you can do anything that you can set your intent towards is key to maintaining positive momentum in life.
We are always transforming, and it’s by recognising when we have transformed (hence the power of establishing transformational “markers” for yourself) that the seeds are planted for the next transformation.
And the seeds of transformation can be as simple as a change in mindset that leads to irreversible changes in our worldview.
For example, last week I was supporting a coaching client through a moment of “stuck-ness”. They shared with me that they felt like they couldn’t make any tangible progress in pursuing their life’s purpose because they needed to dedicate so much time to parenting young children.
“If only I has discovered by life purpose earlier in my life I might have been able to get ahead of it before having children, but now it will just have to go on hold until the kids are older,” they said.
Can you hear the either/or mindset in the way they described their current stuck-ness? This mindset suggests that two competing and unreconcilable life priorities dominate their current worldview.
I asked, “I wonder how these two important priorities might be complementary rather than competing?”
In essence, I was inviting my client to adopt a both/and mindset in considering their stuck-ness rather than maintain either/or thinking.
This invitation to change mindset opened up a raft of new ways of getting unstuck for my client. But the more amazing potentiality is this: This change in mindset can lead to a change in world view (from either/or thinking to a more integrated both/and thinking) which has the potential of positively transforming this client’s life.
But the only way to know that the potential transformation has become an actual transformation is to observe how life (pursuing their purpose and nurturing their children) adjusts over the coming few months.
By recognising that you have ALREADY transformed you set up the possibility for future transformations.
And just like the imaginal cells of butterflies act as a reminder to the caterpillar for what they will become, each transformation you undertake takes you ever closer to realising your True Nature and full life potential.
So, here are my ten considerations for making your next transformation work for you:
- Find and pursue your life’s why.
- Commit to breaking free from your current life patterns and implementing new one’s — this starts on Day 1 and is a daily commitment!
- Create a new arena for impact — a suitable sandpit to practice your transformation (paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller, it’s easier to create something new than change something old).
- Find practices to support and reinforce your journey of transformation.
- Get help and support from others — it’s hard to sustain a transformation by yourself.
- Get outside your comfort zone, be curious and try new things even if you aren’t always sure how they relate to your transformation
- Trust the process of your transformation— follow the plan, it’s a good plan 🙂
- Choose yourself first — others may not want you to change, but if you know you need to transform then others will have no choice to change around you
- You might not always like the experience of transforming, but the end result will be worth it!
- Finally, transformation starts with you recognising you have already transformed.
Knowing that you are ALWAYS transforming all the impetus you need to recognise that you are ready for your left life transformation.
