Why the Pain of Change is Worth It

Change is never neutral. If you experience it enough it becomes normal, but it is never neutral.

It always has an initial effect on you that produces pain or tension. Working out makes you sore, dieting makes you hungry (and cranky), graduating from college means you must enter the workforce or move on to grad school or decide what is next. Even if you purchase your dream home, you still have to pack everything to move into it and unpack once you get there.

This is our experience at work as well. Someone makes a suggestion and our natural response is to find every reason it will not work. Leadership announces a new initiative and we gather around the coffeepot and grumble, confident that if we drag our feet and stall it will not be successful. We are given the opportunity to advance our careers, but it could mean no longer working with friends or more hours or more pressure or a steep learning curve.

So why would we ever want to change anything? Why go after the promotion or try to streamline our work processes or increase productivity or lower costs? There are at least three reasons to decide to push through the pain:

• Growth is only found on the other side of pain. As surely as change produces pain, pushing through the pain brings an opportunity for growth. Working out makes you stronger and moving gets you a new home and trying something new at work opens up possibilities you otherwise would not have. To say it differently, choosing to NOT push through the pain eliminates the potential for growth.

• Growth is a confidence booster, quitting is not. There is something inside of you that makes you feel a little better when you push through an obstacle and a little worse when you quit and go home. And you have quit so many times the it is now a tired narrative in the back of your mind. But you can ALWAYS rewrite your story.

• Growth is always about the long-term play. We choose to initiate things that will bring pain precisely because we know something bigger is at stake. There is a better future to be had, and a new normal waiting for us. Ten years ago none of us thought we needed a smartphone, yet here we are. The pain and learning curve will eventually go away, and what is left is (hopefully) what we were after to begin with.

Change is never neutral, but it is vital to our continued growth professionally and personally.