When people say "we're not good at change" it's is as silly as a school of fish saying "we're not good at swimming." So, where does this illogical belief come from?
Not long ago, a group of researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia* asked thousands of adults about how their preferences and personalities had changed over the previous 10 years.
Nearly everyone in the study could easily recall how they now prefer golf clubs over dance clubs; or how entering a roomful of strangers no longer made them want to curl up and cry, even though they used to be dreadfully shy; or how they can now laugh at many of the things they used to loathe.
In other words, they all knew they had changed quite a bit over the years.
But those same people also believed that they had now finally reached "that magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl," as lead researcher, Dan Gilbert,* puts it.
Now, here's the funny part: How old do you think these people were?
If you guessed they were in their sixties or seventies, you would be partially right. If you guessed they were in their forties or fifties, you would also be partially right. If you guessed they were young adults in their twenties and thirties, you would be right again.
The people in the study spanned the entire spectrum of adulthood.
It didn't matter whether they were 18-years-old or 88-years-old, they all shared the same comically deluded belief that who I am right now is basically who I'm gonna be for the rest of my life.
Never mind that we all have, literally, an entire lifetime of evidence to the contrary.
This, folks, is why organizational change scares us way more than it should. We cling to this faulty assumption that what we like, how we think, and what we can/can't do will remain exactly the same while everything else around us changes.
But that simply isn't true.
It wasn't true ten years ago.
It won't be true in another ten years.
It's definitely not true for you today.
Don't forget that the human mind is the most exquisitely-designed adaptation machine the world has ever known. In the years ahead, the research strongly suggests* you will become more conscientious, more emotionally stable, more trusting, more sociable, more agreeable, and more generous; not to mention more skilled, more knowledgable, and much, much wiser.
That's why the challenges that feel so overwhelming to you today will feel manageable a few months from now. They may even enjoyable a year from now.
*****
NOTES
1. Go here to read more about the research behind "The End of History Illusion" at Harvard and UVA.
2. Dan Gilbert also gives a fascinating 6-minute TED talk on the subject if you prefer watching vs. reading.
3. Way back when I was an undergrad psychology student in the 90's, it was almost universally believed that our personalities become fixed before age 30. But that bubble bursted right around the same time as the dot-com stocks did the same. The first quarter of the 21st century has documented a whole slew of ways in which our supposedly "fixed" traits evolve with age. If you want to learn more, I recommend this entertaining and easily-digested article from the BBC with tons of links to the academic studies if you want to geek out.
4. Caveat: If you're as geeky and/or as skeptical as me, you'll probably wonder why some of the smartest people in the world spent the entire 20th century believing personality was stable if that belief is so obviously false? And you're right. When we compare our personality traits to other people of the same age, traits do seem fairly stable over our lifespan. For example, when you were a teenager, if you scored at the 60th percentile on the trait of Extraversion compared to other teenagers, you will likely remain somewhere around the 60th percentile compared to your peers at age 45, 55, and 65. But that's only because everyone else in your age cohort also became more social, right along with you. But there is a really good chance that your 60-year-old personality will be substantially different than your 16-year-old personality.
