The Power to Change Lies Within Us

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If you decided to live a life that was intentionally agile, what would it look like? You’d accept that everything is changing, evolving, and devolving. You would neither be, nor expect the world to be, predictable. You would also accept that change is what we do all the time. Being a change agent in your own life means embracing new challenges, taking risks, and reinventing ourselves. It’s up to us to wake up and transform ourselves every day.

Personal Metamorphosis Happens Every Day

In Webster’s dictionary, transformation is defined as a “dramatic change in form, a kind of metamorphosis.” But transformation is not as big or scary as you may think. And every moment of every day, you are transforming yourself whether you know it or not.

Take the human body, for example. Your 50 to 70 trillion cells are dying and replacing themselves constantly. Your brain cells regenerate when you sleep; your skin cells every two months. In fact, every part of the human body has its own distinct life cycle.

You are literally becoming a new you all the time. So, remind yourself that you are a creature built for change and growth. And it’s not just you that is changing. Everything around you is changing too.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy travels all along the yellow brick road, gathering a group of misfits along the way, all searching for a powerful Wizard who will solve their problems. During their journey, they become more enlightened and begin to have more control over their own destiny. Their journey becomes a series of developmental moments in self-discovery. When they finally meet up with the Wizard, they realize that they themselves had already solved their problems and made the changes they wanted as they traveled along the road.

Like Dorothy and her friends, you will experience iterative change along the way of life as you transform into a more conscious person. But you need to find your own yellow brick road and tools to traverse it.

Four Important Tips for Embracing Change

1. Change is personal. It affects you and everyone else differently, depending on where you sit, your genetics and psychology, and how you view uncertainty and your personal power.

2. Change can be positive or negative. The Chinese character for change is made of two parts—“crisis” and “opportunity.” The dual nature of the character reflects the reality of transformation. Some of us naturally love change and embrace the thrill and opportunity in it. Others naturally resist change and view it as disquieting and disruptive. Whatever the case, the power to transform lies dormant inside of you.

3. Change is messy and complicated. One of the main reasons we get stuck is that we get trapped in our own philosophy about change. Namely, how much personal power we feel to shape our own destiny. And the level of acceptance we have about the uncertainty of life. We must get the balance between our personal power and our acceptance of uncertainty just right or we succumb to becoming a victim, a controller, or a fatalist.

4. Conscious people do it differently. They travel into the unknown. They keep the bigger picture in mind, and they recognize the natural impermanence of life. Most importantly, conscious people focus on the present moment because the past is gone, and the future is not here yet.