Practicing Change

(Photo by Columbia Movers)

A couple of conversations over the weekend made me think about how we cope with changes. Many people seem to feel it’s a fact of life that people find it more difficult to cope with change as we get into the latter portion of our lives.

Listening to variations on that theme, I wondered whether it’s true. I think it isn’t.

Instead, I think how we cope with change is a matter of how much practice we get at it, and perhaps a matter of whether the types of changes we need to grapple with are similar enough to types we handled in the past. Like any other skill, coping with changes requires practice. Whatever we’ve gotten the most practice handling is what we can handle best now.

Example: Relocating

For about 15 years there was an unwritten law of the universe that my contracts would last an average of about a year, with each one at least 1000 miles from the previous project and requiring me to move to its location. Sometimes I was in one place for a couple of years. Sometimes I relocated two or three times within a year.

When I looked into using relocation services, they consistently wanted to put me in the most expensive housing they could get me to agree to, typically across town from my client. Why would I do that to myself? If I’m moving 1000 miles to work on the client site, I don’t want a long commute every day of the project. I said no thank you and came up with my own system.

I didn’t line up a place to live ahead of time. I pre-arranged a 10’ x 15’ storage unit. When I got to the new location, I backed my specially built utility trailer into it, which fit with a couple of inches to spare on each side and maybe an inch at the top. I locked the storage unit, then rented an inexpensive hotel room for my first week or two on the project. That gave me time to find an apartment close to the work site, a little under average market rent.

Over the years I refined this so that much of my stuff stayed in heavy duty cargo boxes instead of loading and unloading cardboard boxes. Cargo boxes double as bench seating. I didn’t have much conventional furniture: a cedar wardrobe, cedar chest, futon sofa, reclining chair. My bed was a platform assembled with my Swiss army knife and laid across cargo boxes with a foam slab on top. My table was plywood that gave my trailer load shape and sturdiness for the moves, and I assembled the table base with my Swiss army knife. I moved cross-country for $700 to $1500, despite having 40+ boxes of paper (especially a lot of technical manuals) to drag around in addition to everything else. By not asking clients to reimburse moving costs, I could negotiate higher contract rates. They had no idea the moving costs I absorbed were so low.

This worked well for moving around within the USA. Moving to the UK was very different. The work visa was absurdly difficult to get. The rules for how I had to pack and label my belongings for shipment were absurdly bothersome. I had lots of practice at relocating, but not internationally. Simply getting myself and my stuff to the UK was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done.

About three years later, in conversation with a British man, he said he used to want to live abroad but he couldn’t do it now. He said he was too old to cope with it. He was the age at which I had moved to the UK. I remember thinking, “Wimp!” but that wasn’t a fair thought. I did have practice relocating across the USA, and that helped. He didn’t have practice he could lean on to help him cope with moving abroad.

The Type of Change Matters

I’ve known people whose employer transferred them every two of three years, not just all over the country but all over the world, as part of preparing them for upper management in a large multinational. They learned to cope with being uprooted that often, sent to yet another portion of the company they hadn’t seen before and maybe thrown into an unfamiliar culture.

What pulled the rug from beneath them? Let the multinational hit the skids and toss them into the job market, and that’s where they didn’t have much practice. That was hard.

Practice and Adaptation

As we grow older, we begin to lose some of our capabilities. We may lose muscle strength, stamina, quickness, some of our mental sharpness… but we continue to gain experience. We continue to practice doing things. We learn ways to compensate at least partially for whatever isn’t working as well as it used to. We learn to adapt what we’ve done before to fit new circumstances.

I think this counts for our ability to cope with changes as much as it does with anything else. I also think it counts for businesses as much as it does with people. Businesses are, after all, full of people.

Although it’s rare, I have encountered at least one large multinational that folded this into its methods of running the company. Every few years, the company jumps into a new fad about how to run projects or how to do business process improvement. It used to annoy me.

Then I realized they weren’t really just following fads. It’s easy for a big company to become complacent and set in their ways. To avoid that, they were deliberately shaking themselves up on a regular basis. It kept them from getting stuck in a rut and failing to adjust to shifts in their industry. It kept them in practice at initiating and coping with change.

So if anyone says you’ll have trouble coping with change because you’re grey-haired and perhaps a little gimpy, don’t be too quick to believe them. The older you are, the more practice you’ve got at coping with changes and you may have practiced more types of change than someone younger. No matter what capacities you’ve lost, you’ve still got all that practice, including practice adapting.

You, with your grey hair, may be better at it than the young ones.