Change Is Already Here
A fresh lens to help you understand the world change you experience.
Every time we think of change we fall into one of two camps: Those who will be tasked with implementing it (and therefore are the first to resist it because they know it will mean extra work) and those who will stand to reap its benefits (and usually just cannot wait to see it).
I’m grossly oversimplifying things of course. The implementors, in most cases, also benefit from change and those who appear to reap its rewards most easily also end up doing extra work in order to adjust. Plus, there’s those who will always resist no matter what (because they long for the past) and there are those who will always root for it (because they’re running from the present).
Back in 2019 I published a piece that’d been written years earlier about our seemingly broken system and the change that’s coming and it reads today not just current, but prophetic. The reason it reads so fresh lies in the simple fact that the change that back then I was responding to, through my writing, as a perception is now, actually, here.
Where? You will ask. How? All we can see is a world that’s been turned upside down and systems that are no longer fit for purpose. And yes, that’s correct. That is what we all, more or less, see and experience. But that is not what is.
In neuroscience change is directly linked to neuroplasticity. in turn, is defined as the “ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections.” This points to the fact that every time we need to change our behavior our body and brain engage in energetically expensive rewiring which then needs to be integrated into our existing internal structure. It’s like adding a new tram line in a city and having to rethink the entire road network as a result.
It doesn’t happen easily or on a whim (and I argue it shouldn’t) and when it does it is both costly to initiate and costly to maintain. When the world arounds us changes we need to adjust which means we also need to change. That change requires the rewiring of internal neural networks in our brain and the building of new ones, a change in speed in decision-making in some contexts and a broadening of our knowledge and perception as we strive to alter our worldview.
When we speak about change in any context we’re actually talking about physical beings having to behave differently and process the information presented by their environment in a different way and that results in hidden but real, changes in their internal structure.
The Motivation For Change
Anyone who’s ever been subjected to one of those interminable meetings about change and has been subjected to the catechism of “change agents” and “change evangelists” and “change champions” necessary to effect “a culture of change” knows well the deep sense of dread that starts to build up and the visceral, but hidden, reaction to resist.
It doesn’t matter the context of the situation nor the country of the respondents. All they hear and feel is the need to do more hard work for no real reason and with ambivalent future rewards. If that sounds like a successful recipe for change to you my guess is your neurobiology originates from a different planet. On this one change only happens when we are motivated to change.
When are we motivated to change? Only when what we experience as our current situation is so uncomfortable for us that we have no choice but to seek relief which then makes a change in circumstances accompanied by a change in behavior, inevitable. Because behavior is a series of choices attended by actions that, essentially, also becomes our new life.
On a much broader scale we see change as the progress that is made from a less enlightened and bearable state to one that is more so, on every count. That also happens to be the neuroscientific definition of motivation which takes us from a situation that is causing us discomfort to one that will provide relief through a complex series of internal events in our brain that are driven by a series of dopaminergic interactions.
If, at any point, you’re experiencing the world as a dismally black place bereft of hope and light consider that what you’re actually seeing are the seeds of change taking root. Every time you feel intense discomfort in your current situation or even in the picture you’re seeing of the world around you, you will eventually be motivated to do something about it.
In that sense the change we seek, is already here. It’s taking root as we speak and the actions that will, over time, manifest the more positive outcome we expect, are already in motion.
