Change

When we declare that all aspects of the journey are valuable,

life becomes precious!

– Marylin Atkinson

We, people, go through changes all the time. Then, what is our perspective of change under the present circumstances we have been living during these last two years? This pandemic situation has caused the rules of our life game to change abruptly and significantly for most of us. The experience of change that we have been undergoing every day depends basically on the personal attitude towards decision-making to face such change.

We had believed that we knew all the rules in and out and we had control over our lives. To our surprise, we suddenly found ourselves in need of reorganizing, changing and even transforming the moves on our life game board. However, all these changes do not happen overnight, they require us to stop and rethink and be willing to reassess our role and purpose in the changes we want to go through.

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of the book Coaching Habits, writes about how easy it would be to make a small or a big change stating that everything depends on the kind of attachment a person wants to change. The good news, it is being said that human beings are beings of innovation. Therefore, we are now going to ask ourselves what kind of change or changes we want to make and how we will prioritize our attachments or get rid of them. In addition, we indeed need to think about the impact that these changes will cause on our lives, on others and, even on our environment.

If we keep in mind that the ontology of language refers to the way, we live our day-to-day lives in the language of people. From this perspective, we see how conversations in the family, in the business world, with yourself, coaching conversations are moving into new learning areas thanks to the willingness to revalue the quality of those conversations to develop better relationship environments among us.

Furthermore, it is important to mention the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset’ statement: “I am myself and my circumstances, if I do not save my circumstances, I won’t save myself either”. Reflecting on this, we need to focus on the significant changes we have shaped in our interaction with others considering the current context. Changes such as the fact that now we can face a new kind of intimacy of interaction with ourselves and with others make us revise closely the purpose of our conversations. This revision can be sorted out within three main scenarios in the language in our everyday conversations.

As a number one change, we can say that the language was used to make emphasis on the I rather than the community and as a way of trading information of colloquial expressions such as: Hello, how are you?  What are you doing? How was your day? How is everything? rushing to assume that things were just fine.

Then, the second refers to the new life rules that opened doors to living the language in intimate listening and expressing our feelings more openly and profoundly with our partner, with our children, with the beloved ones, with our team and work colleagues in response to the uncertainty of the tomorrow. The conversations we are having now, make us keep in mind the idea of being present showing real interest and, care about the other ones by having an active and generous listening during the pandemic season.

Finally, the post-pandemic change, where this experience of intimacy requires our conversations to make transfers of the change, we are experiencing so that our attitudes and decisions have an assertive impact on our lives, others as well as our environment itself.

The other main change, aside from the intimacy of interaction, demands from us to take into account the fact of giving meaning to words within our daily language of ´we´, ´here and now, wellbeing, to mention some of them, have become stronger and gained personal meaning when setting our objectives, making decisions and taking actions expanding from “I” to “We”, from “yesterday and tomorrow” to “here and now!”. In short, being present at all times!

Despite the fact we know that our lives are moving at an increasing speed without allowing us to stop and reflect on the real meaning of our journey in the present context we have been living, the learning of being able to handle deep and meaningful conversations has made the world, independently of different pace and approaches, reevaluate and change life priorities at all levels. Then, the inevitable question arises: How are we going to keep these conversations going once the pandemic season is finally gone?

Probably, before answering this question we need to review what has changed in our lives during this time.

To sum up, we must say that it is crucial to think about the true meaning we should give to our lives the necessary changes for them to be significant and long-lasting for greater and better life quality of our own and the others’ taking into account the generated learning in this stage we have to live and towards the legacy we want to leave behind thanks to the new changes in this process of permanent transformation.