Making Change Work for You
Recent events have exposed our vulnerability whereby one seemingly simple virus can destroy entire economies, forecasts and plans. Given global safety and health concerns, we were all in the same boat shifting immediately into a new routine and lifestyle. Today’s reality imposes new requirements on each of us that incorporates flexibility and embracing change with “open eyes”. Like it or not, at the first stage of change it’s almost impossible to maintain awareness given our emotional level. Reactions are a natural response to stimuli. Routine ensures stability followed by emotional balance, however once we receive stimuli (news-events-situations) we react emotionally. Positive stimuli generates excitement and euphoria while negative stimuli deploys dysphoria and depression. This state is very individual, and its length depends on the scale of the news-events-situations and how personal they are to us. For example, remember falling in love — a feeling of ecstasy such that you didn’t perceive reality, viewed your partner through rose-colored glasses without any deficiencies, and if any — they were of no concern. Or another opposite situation, when you lost something valuable and the picture of your world immediately transformed into devastation and darkness. However, nothing lasts forever, and these acute emotional states do fade.
At the second stage of change, we still continue processing our emotions, but their intensity diminishes, giving path to logic and reasoning. At this point, we begin to realize that our new