How can I master the art of change?

Host: How can I master the art of change?

Sean McArdle: See, one of the things that I believe is absolutely imperative today, is to understand that the world changes at a speed we can not even see. I will give you an example, when I was a child, most of the printing in the world was done on letterpress machines with movable type, created from a linotype, created by a man named Mergenthaler who had studied another man who made type named Gutenberg. Now, we are going back hundreds and hundreds of years, because Gutenberg s type actually was developing uniform form, almost 10,000 years ago in the orient. Now, we have made much advancement by the time I was born, in the way that we printed books and magazines. Today, we have Digital, Variable data printing presses which will change the copy on every single sheet of paper. So, technology has changed, but so have we. It used to be that a child did not learn to read until they were in the first grade. Today, children are learning to read in nursery school and by the time they show up in the first grade, if they can not read, they are actually, looked upon as developed mentally slow. So, how do we deal with the fact that the world keeps changing, the sand keeps moving under our feet and the answer is, we have to frame it in a way that is meaningful and positive for us. Let me give you an example, the man says, No, I will not buy it from you, I never will buy from you. I shake his hand and say, Thank you, I can not thank you enough. So, the man says, Why would you thank me? I just said no. I say, Well, I know I need to make four sales calls to make one sale; you are my third no , so the next one must be a yes. You see, it is how you look at change that will determine whether you embrace it or fear it.

Most people say the fear change, I do not buy that. Some change is extraordinary. For instance, we were using telephones with seven digit phone numbers when I was I child, now, we are using flip phones that we carry with us wherever we go. That kind of change has been very, very positive. What if you were to look at all the changes you have to make over the period of a career as a very positive thing and then embrace that change instead of fearing it? The answer is you would become better at it. Now, there is more to the question than that and that is how do we embrace change? The answer is understand what change is. We operate from a series of ideas in our mind called, belief. Belief is not just information. When you were a child, mom said, Do not go near the stove, you might get burnt and you knew what she said, but you did not believe it. So, one day, sure enough, you backed up to a hot stove and you got burnt. Now, through actually experiencing the burn, you have gone from somebody who knows not to go near a hot stove to somebody who believes you should not go near a hot stove.

One causes interest, the other causes action. So, for the rest of your life, you are careful around stoves that might be hot. Well, belief is just like that. It is knowledge experienced. So, if you want to make active change in your life, you must gain knowledge about the change you wish to make and then you must make sure that you act on it immediately. Once you act on it, you can start to form a belief, this was good for me, this was bad for me. If you think it was good for you, then you are more likely to continue to go down that path. If you think it was worse for you, it is most likely you will not make that change.