A constant process of renewal, development, exploration and remaking is surely to be embraced, but many of us resist change – it’s in our nature. I confront the roadblocks that stop us evolving …
Browsing through back issues of the Dublin Review during recent quiet days, I came across an old Seamus Heaney essay on revision. He was writing, in the main, about bringing his poem “Lightenings” through various drafts, and offered these drafts up, one, two, three, enabling the reader to trace the poem’s development.
The expression of the poem’s opening image (a silhouetted, shivering beggar) remains constant, while the rest of the poem grows around it. The essay reveals more about change than solely the work of revision which strengthens a poem’s heartbeat at every pass. Heaney’s thinking at the time of writing had been influenced by a greater consciousness of the spirit, after his experience at the deathbeds of his parents, “witnessing the pure change, simple, momentous, and mysterious” that occurred in those moments.
It’s a striking idea, that sometimes there is a shift, a clearing, a refiguring in the way we think and interpret the world, and that this “new emotion and new way of figuring” changes how we live, the work we do, how we relate to the people in our lives and ourselves. In Heaney’s case, it entered his poem from the start, and influenced the changes he made in moulding its final shape.
“Whether we seek it or not, change is part of the passage of time.”
It’s accelerated at certain points by unbidden events, often sad ones like bereavement or the loss of a relationship. But even when change comes from the occurrence of more positive events, it can still feel traumatic: it’s not necessarily simple to cope with a new job, a house move, emigration, a new baby, adopting a dog. Some changes (looking at you, babies and dogs) are so exciting and absorbing that you can’t adapt your life quickly enough to incorporate them, but others can take what feels like forever to process.
What about the opposite situation, a situation where there’s something you want to change, but somehow, paradoxically, you don’t and you can’t? Researchers in the Harvard Graduate School of Education have worked for over 30 years on enabling people to overcome what seems to be an innate aversion to change: Dr Robert Kegan and Dr Lisa Lahey call it immunity to change. Kegan describes the fundamental concept as being that the mind, like the body, contains an elegant built-in system designed to protect us.
For the most part, the physical immune system does a stand-up job parrying germs and toxins and other nasties, but there are times when it can work against us, say for example in the rejection of an organ transplant. Similarly, this mental immune system can protect us from being able to make changes we are actively seeking. It weighs up a deeper competing commitment against the intended change and stymies the plan. What is the effect of this? Struggling fruitlessly, while knowing there is a change you are intent on making, can leave you feeling like an exhausted failure, a feeling which can develop into a kind of self-contempt. How harshly we judge ourselves.
“The very processes of renewal, development, exploration, and remaking keep us curious and engaged, with ourselves and with others.”
There’s one sense in which the concept of immunity to change is good news, in that it gives a sliver of a chance that I am not actually the weak-willed failure I have been giving the evil eye to in the mirror for so many years. Maybe it is not that I don’t want to change, not that I don’t have the discipline or the drive. Maybe it’s not my fault. I’ll certainly feel better if it’s not, but that’s not enough. To refigure, I also need to know how I can close the gap between my intentions and my actual behaviour. What does immunity to change look like, and how can we identify the competing commitment that is outside our awareness, yet at the same time baked into us?
You know you need to delegate more at work. You want to, it would certainly help with your workload, and your team members would feel more empowered. You’re pretty self-aware, you discuss the delegation issue with your boss. Things are going to be different around here. You are going to delegate more. You don’t delegate more. You sense, deep down, that if you delegated more, the work just wouldn’t be done well enough. (That’s your competing commitment, and obviously incompatible with delegating more.) Other people are not as capable as you. (That’s your big assumption, and you’re going to need to challenge it.)
Take everyone’s most loathed old chestnut. You are going to help your heart, weight, physical and mental health by getting fitter. You’re going to run 10k. You buy some really gorgeous leg-sculpting leggings. You start working late. You don’t have time to train. Work is so busy that you skip the lunchtime Pilates class which would strengthen your glutes and help with the running you are not doing. You sense deep down that if you ran anywhere other than across an unpopulated island at 4am someone would spot you and notice that you were no longer the runner you had been in your 20s. You must protect yourself from that. (That’s your competing commitment, and it’s at odds with hitting the track or the treadmill three times a week.) You are worth less now that you are past your physical prime. (That’s your big assumption, and it’s about to get the old one-two.) Because the competing commitment, and the big assumption that sustains it, together bar your way. The only way through is to confront and disassemble them.
In an organisational setting, change is a managed process, unless you’re a global social media villain, in which case you fire off an unproofed announcement while scratching your stomach, then set aside the afternoon to smirk at the replies. In Ireland, 17-year-olds are now taught change management strategies as part of the Leaving Certificate business curriculum: these strategies revolve around careful communication and leadership, consultation with employees and the relevant unions, the provision of appropriate training and rewards, and monitoring how the whole thing falls together over time. The process is spelled out from soup to nuts. It favours buy-in, preparedness, and longevity, and has created roles for change managers, change consultants, change communications executives, transformation leaders, jobs whose existence speaks to just how important it is to get change right. At home, it’s usually just going to be you, communicating to yourself, preparing yourself, monitoring yourself, egging yourself on. But you can brief a pal to check in on you, to send a text asking whether you’ve actually found the tissue paper in the toes of your runners.
Ezra Pound’s modernist rallying cry, “Make it new” spoke not just of simple novelty but of a constant process of renewal, development, exploration, and remaking. We can apply it to ourselves, particularly as we get older, by which time chances have been passed up through fear, careers have worked out in a certain way, precious relationships have turned out to be transient. Habits have hardened. The prospect of change may feel less likely and more overwhelming. But it’s essential. In fact, we are always refiguring, even if, as in Heaney’s poem, the central image remains constant. The very processes of renewal, development, exploration, and remaking keep us curious and engaged, with ourselves and with others. And that’s what it’s all about.
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