Some people like change while others don’t. Some like the object of change but not the process. Personally I relish it and tend to get bored if I don’t do something. Perhaps that’s why, at an age when most of my peers have opted for cardigan and slippers, I’m on my 6th career. Hold on, my wife is now on her 4th career and she doesn’t like change. She does, however, like the object of the change is a very determined person.
So, change is inevitable; it happens all the time whether you want it to or not. The important issue is whether or not you have any control over that change or feel that you do. When it comes to wider social change, those individuals that can create that alone are few and far between and even they need supporters. For most of the rest of us, however, the important changes are likely to be the ones that we make individually. These, of course, no one else can really make for you, although they can help.
In my own case, I’m very aware my childhood gave me the impetus to create order out of chaos while my early years in the army provided me with the expertise to organise the process. So that, when I joined the voluntary sector as an unemployed single parent on a Job Creation scheme on a project that was threatened with immediate closure, rescuing it and making is successful was like a duck taking to the water. So much so that I’ve repeated the process with other charities. It is, I have to say, immensely satisfying to see those organisations flourishing many years later.
I also believe that many of us see what others have achieved and convince ourselves that these are special people who can do what others can’t, and there may be some truth in that. However, there is just a much that is fallacious. I, for example, had done no real physical exercise from the age of 18 until I was 40; at which point I decided that, unless I did something, it was all downhill from here on. So, that evening, I went for a, very short, run. By the end of the week, I was running for 40 minutes and, in my mid 50’s ran the London marathon on two separate occasions; the first in 3¾ hours.
So, do you want to change and can you do it? Well, the answer, I believe, is likely to be “yes” to both. You just have to try and then take that first small step. If you continue, you will achieve and, more importantly, I doubt whether you will ever revert to what was before.