My office partners, Jim and Connie, are constantly on the lookout for better office space, or different ways to configure the space we currently occupy. It is not because they are necessarily dissatisfied with things the way they are, rather for them it is part of an ongoing process of finding ways to more effectively serve the needs of their clients. In their minds the right office space is a necessary ingredient in the growth and evolution of their business, and that’s why they continually examine it. I admire them for that, and have observed their business grow because of it.
Change, it is one of the most difficult and disruptive things we contend with, yet it is inevitable. Whether we are the initiators of change like my office partners or it simply occurs around us it is going to happen, and it is for our own good that it does; for without change or willingness to participate in change there is no progress. It is the only way growth and renewal can occur.
William Bridges in his classic book Transitions explains it this way: “Throughout nature, growth involves periodic accelerations and transformations: Things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to change – until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird molts, the hibernation begins. With us it is the same,” he goes on. “Although the signs are less clear than in the world of feather and leaf, the functions of transition times are the same. They are key times in the natural process of self-renewal.”
We just moved. It was a difficult and disruptive decision, as change always is, to leave the house we had lived in for the past twenty-three years. Neither did we do so because we were necessarily dissatisfied with things the way they were. Rather we had been searching – like my friends Jim and Connie – for ways that would better serve the needs of our family in the years to come. We found it, our beautiful new dream home, but we would never have done so had we not been willing to change.