It can never be good news when an e-mail arrives from your CEO at 5pm on a Friday night letting you know that this is their last e-mail as CEO and that a new CEO will be starting on Monday! Sending it out just before the weekend may be a delaying tactic or just a "sod it, not my problem" issue but either way it sent me and my team into a bit of a panic.
Why, who, when and more importantly what will this mean for me? These were the questions running through everyone's heads on Friday night. Some decided to foretell the unknown over a glass of wine whilst some of us decided that the weekend had started and what was an unknown quantity on Friday would still be there waiting for us on Monday! I tried to console my team by throwing down a few trite phrases such as "a change is as good as a rest" but they just rang a little hollow. It got me thinking about change and why it is so hard to embrace it.
Change as a verb means to make or become different and as a noun it means an act or process through which something becomes different. Why does something which we subconsciously seek to do every day frighten us when it smacks us in the face with a big screaming neon sign "CHANGE". Why is it easy to change your mascara, change your diet, change your evening plans but the thought of a changing jobs. changing hair styles and changing friends is so terrifying?
When you are small you cannot wait to change. Being fourteen was going to be amazing. I was going to be madly in love with Bros and have incredible eyelashes like the supercool 14 year old who lived next door. When the big 1 4 cam around I was planning my academic career and wanted to be prime minister! These were big life changing decisions that I was planning and I could not have been more excited and determined to make them happen.
But thinking back somewhere around my 21st birthday the unknown became less exciting and a little more daunting and it has been a downward spiral ever since. I no longer became excited about not knowing what was next for me. It stopped being full of endless possibilities and instead became full of the possibility that it was all going to go wrong. There was a pervading fear that if I made the wrong choice and changed something it would all be horribly disappointing and I would be foolish and sad. At what point does the optimism of childhood give way to the fears and self doubt of adulthood?
Change that doesn't come from us is scary. Who wants to relinquish control of their happiness and career to someone else?
