I recently spoke with a friend who has spent his whole career in the corporate world. For nearly twenty years, he has held the same position in the same company and he has even retained most of the same small team for the majority of this time.
But last week, someone he has worked with for nearly twenty years left the company. And recently, another member of the team—someone my friend has worked with for around a decade—also resigned from their position in the company.
And to add to these tectonic shifts in his work environment, his company just sold off its corporate offices to take its operations completely virtual. Everything about his day-to-day life within this corporate world changed in just a matter of weeks.
Through his story, I am reminded of one irrefutable fact: Even if we do not create change in our lives, the one thing that is constant is change. It’s time to let go of the fear of change and the fear of the unknown in our professional lives and instead embrace it.
Change is Part of Our Reality
I witness change in the lives of the business owners I work with every day. But lately, I am coming to a deeper realization that change is everywhere. In my own life, I am seeing it happen in major ways. My children have graduated high school and are moving on to college and the military, marking a new chapter in my life and my relationship with my wife.
But it’s not just in my life where I see these changes occurring. Married couples get divorced. Companies go through mergers and acquisitions, peoples’ job roles change, or they get new bosses.
Nobody likes change, but it is a real, tangible part of our reality. Change is everything. With rapid advancements in technology and our society, our lives are changing faster than ever before. We can’t control change, but we can control how we think about it.
Stay Flexible and Embrace Change
It’s easy to recognize physical change as we age. Perhaps we see more gray hairs season after season or we feel more sore after a day spent on the ski slopes than we did the year before. However, it may not be so easy to track our mental changes or the mental inflexibility that shows up as we age.
As business owners, we must always be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances—and we have to control the way we feel about these changes. In fact, we must celebrate them.
We have to deal with change all the time and often must make decisions based on very little information. To do this, we must stay flexible. It’s good practice to exercise flexibility in our mindset. It is only through this flexibility that we can embrace the outcomes and see the opportunities housed in change. We have to recognize change as it happens, then identify how we can be more nimble. Then, it’s up to us to decide how we feel about change, consider it, and control our outcomes by thinking differently about change—especially when we don’t like change.
Learning to control our mindset can be the biggest asset a business owner can leverage on the road to success. If you find yourself in a situation of dramatic change in the corporate world and want to talk about what comes next, perhaps it’s time we talk. Don’t hesitate to give me a call. Now is the time to embrace change, and I’d love to help.
David Weaver is the Founder of Franchise Your Freedom and a senior consultant with FranChoice, the premier national network of franchise consultants. David helps people all over the country find the right franchise fit by sharing his personal experience and philosophy on how to select the right brand. He shares proven strategies and over a decade of experience growing franchise companies for himself with those that are doing it for the first time. You can learn more about David at FranchiseYourFreedom.