Fears About Job Changes are Natural
There is nothing that can be more unsettling in the workplace than looming changes. Especially if it is rumored to be big. It’s understandable. We have gotten to see this up close and personal in the Federal Government recently. Big changes can have big ramifications and in today’s world that could mean being laid off, forced to relocate, or ending up doing something that may not be as fulfilling as what you are doing now.
The problem is that no matter how comfortable we are in the here and now, change is inevitable. Further complicating the issue is that we may have an idea about what the future holds, but we don’t know with certainty like we do with the present and the past. We like certainty and our minds tend to equate uncertainty with danger. The defense mechanism is to resist the change and avoid the danger.
How do we know that change is inevitable? We simply have to look at the past. Can you imagine rolling up in the present day in a model T Ford? Horse and buggy? Do we still have to have ice delivered to the house to put into the icebox or salt our meat because we don’t have refrigeration? How many of you could take a cross country trip using only a road atlas? You might be able to do it, but why would you given the tools we have today? It’s preposterous.
Looking back, we know change is happening rapidly. I mean it wasn’t all that long ago that we had black and white TV’s, and now we are streaming Netflix on our phones. Tell that to Alexander Graham Bell. Now we move to a future where AI will be ever present. Humans will have to sort information from misinformation in real time at a faster pace than ever and our currency may not be backed by anything even remotely resembling gold. Scary stuff!
What can we do to put the brakes on the fear for a moment and use our mindset to not only survive the changes that are coming, but use them to our advantage?
Worry Less
Easier said than done but before you chalk me up to being an insensitive *insert your favorite four letter word here,* hold on a second. As someone who has dealt with anxiety throughout the course of my life, I have observed a thing or two about my own personal worrying habits. First, you can’t stop yourself from worrying completely and that is ok. Acknowledge it, give yourself space and time to worry, but put a limit on it.
One of the things that I do when dealing with a bout of anxiety is to give myself a set period of time to worry and let my mind go wild playing the “what if” game with my worst case scenario, but when the timer goes off, its time to move on. I might give myself 10-15 minutes to do this and force myself to go and do something else. Exercise helps.
Journaling is another way to move the anxiety from your body to the page and can be extremely cathartic in tough times. There is something about seeing it on the page that doesn’t make it seem so scary but yet acknowledges it at the same time.
This strategy is particularly effective if you are dealing with a change that has not happened yet. If you talk to people who have gone through big life events, they will often say that they worried way more about something before it happened than they needed to, even if it was close to their worst-case scenario.
Pianist Ben Folds has a lyric in his song “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You” that goes like this: “Now that I have the disease, in a way I’m relieved, because I don’t have to stress about it like you do.” In my case, I had some health anxiety and thought I had a disease that to this day I haven’t gotten.
What is going to happen will happen if you worry about it or not. Instead, address your concerns, make a plan, and when the time comes, enact the plan if you have to. In a sense, you need to be your own personal emergency manager.
You can’t stop yourself from worrying altogether, but if you take some of that worry time and convert it into something more productive, you will ultimately feel like you have more control over the situation and that will help with the uncertainty.
Worst-Case Scenarios are Exactly That
When dealing with change and uncertainty, the defense mechanism automatically tries to find the worst-case scenario in order to assess the level of danger that we could be dealing with. There is a new boss in town and therefore I am going to lose my job. While this very well may be a possibility, it is often the outlier in an envelope of solutions that includes everything from no change at all to worst-case scenario.
The probabilities that the worst case will actually play out are usually pretty low but in some cases they can be higher than others. The worst-case scenario of losing your job if you work for a company cutting half its employees has a higher risk of becoming true than if you work for one cutting 10%. As stated earlier, acknowledge that this worst case is a possibility and make a plan to deal with it, but don’t dwell on it once that plan is in place.
The reality for most situations is that there is a much higher probability that something less extreme will occur or if the worst case does occur it may happen at a much slower pace than anticipated, giving you more time to craft a solution.
Play the Game You Are Being Asked to Play
Author and professional poker player Annie Duke’s book, “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts” is a must read for these situations. In the book, Duke says that real life is like Poker because in Poker, you can make the best decision possible with the cards you have and still lose the hand. That might not be comforting but it is very true.
We get dealt new cards every day and our situation changes. We can only make the best decisions based on the information we do have and the probabilities that certain outcomes will occur. When we get new information, we can recalibrate.
The trick is to understand the game you are being asked to play and play it to the best of your ability. You may not like the game or how the rules are changing (pitch clock, baseball fans?), but if you can adjust on the fly you will keep pace with change or maybe even get ahead of it.
Problems arise when you keep trying to play a game that you are no longer being asked to play. Chances are you will find yourself on the bench while that new rookie eats up your playing time.
Being an Early Adopter Means Helping Steer the Train
When it comes to change, especially if its change to internal work policy or procedures, there is often a train that is already speeding down the tracks. It’s going in one direction and that is forward. You have two options: Get on the train, or get run over by it. Make no mistake, it WILL run you over. Depending upon how quickly you get on board the train, you may have an opportunity to help steer it.
Denial of the change or trying to throw up a roadblock up is not going to be helpful to those trying to make the change and suddenly you become a liability. Instead, you can build trust by acknowledging the goal and objective of the change and that you are on board. Once you have that trust, if you don’t like where the train is heading, it will be easier to offer alternative routes or solutions that may be more amenable to the situation. If you are combative from the start, you will never get that opportunity.
With Every Change Comes Opportunity
If you haven’t noticed yet, Gen Z is pretty damn good at dealing with change.
I’m going against my own advice and generalizing here, but there are enough of us in the older generations who like to play the narrative that Gen Z is entitled and has no loyalty. If they don’t like their job they will quit and go somewhere else. They should just be happy they have a job like the rest of us did, grinding our fingers to the bone in our 9 to 5s. Soft.
I suspect some of us are envious. I wish I had the stones to just get up and do something different. By being born into a time period where change is happening at and exponential rate, Gen Z has a baseline of rapid change that none of us have seen to this point. With that comes a level of comfort in making bigger decisions, and they are reaping the rewards.
With change comes opportunity and Gen Z’ers who are not happy with work life balance or their company cultures are leaving the “steady and stable” jobs of the past to pursue other opportunities. By doing so, some are getting richer financially, and others might be making less money but are living richer lives doing something more fulfilling than being chained to a desk.
As you inevitably face change, it can be fruitful to consider what you’ve always wanted to pursue, but never felt the time was right. By exploring the avenues available to you, you are essentially making an emergency action plan. If that worst-case scenario does materialize and you lose your job, you already have a clear direction of what your next options and opportunities could be. The uncertainty then becomes a catalyst to think outside the box.
There is no Wrong Decision, Only the Next Decision
“I can’t leave my job! What if I make the wrong decision and I fail?” Failure is an interesting concept. We often look at it as an on off switch. We think there is going to be this one singular moment that we drive Mario off the cliff and the analog Nintendo music plays as the screen flashes “GAME OVER.” Womp Womp.
More realistic is that we are always on a spectrum between some pie in the sky unachievable thing that we call success and what we define for ourselves as the ultimate failure. Those definitions are different for each of us but whatever they are, we exist somewhere in the middle.
The great thing is that there is no wrong decision that is going to take us to the ultimate failure. A particular decision might bring us a step closer but as soon as we make that decision there is ultimately another decision to be made, and another opportunity to course correct and move back closer to our definition of success.
So rather than being paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong decision, take comfort in the fact that as soon as you make it, another will follow. It doesn’t matter which door you walk through, it’s the attitude you take with you that matters.
You Already Have the Tools To Succeed
You only have to look to your past to realize that you have been dealing with big changes your entire life. Whatever your next challenge is, you will rise to meet it and one day you will find yourself on the other side looking back, more experienced, more successful, and ready to take on the next big change, which will inevitably be right around the corner.
The Japanese have a saying, “mono no aware” which is an awareness of the impermanence of things: that everything is temporary. The more we understand this, the more prepared we can be for the uncertainty that comes with it and the more we can thrive in a constantly changing environment.
As giant changes inevitably affect your job, whether next week or five years from now, take the actions you need to takee in order to take care of yourself. Constructively process the worry that creeps in. Assign a realistic probability to the most likely and worst-case scenarios, play the game you are being asked to play and jump on that train so you can help steer it. Find the opportunities, give yourself grace when making decisions, and believe that you have what it takes to be successful!
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