Reality-Based Leadership: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace, and Turn Excuses into Results

Chapter 6. Change Is a Fact of Life—Get Over It! How to Bullet-Proof Your Employees

The ability to handle change is the best insurance policy money can't buy. It insulates us in hard times and enhances our performance in good times. If you prize flexibility—and everyone should—you will look at change as an opportunity or a practice to cultivate. Change is inevitable and impersonal, like the weather. It's an opportunity on which to capitalize; a whetstone to make us sharper. Yet our initial response to change is rarely constructive.

In a word, we tend to resist. Even changes we have anticipated, we greet with surprise. When change comes, we immediately feel threatened. We start to react, mentally, with stressful stories that we can't know to be ...