Why Is Change So Hard? Stop Waiting for the Roof to Catch Fire

You have your suspicions about that troublesome team member, but you do not make a change until they do something egregious. What if that never happens? What if the crisis never comes?

Then you have spent months avoiding a problem that has been gnawing away at your team's culture. Why is change so hard for most of us? Because we wait for rock bottom to give us permission. If things are good enough, we keep moving. If a crisis shows up, we will adjust.

That employee does not always embezzle funds or harass a coworker. Sometimes misaligned incentives and a bad attitude just eat away at the core of the team, quietly, for years. You cannot wait for change. You have to be proactive.

Change is already happening whether you choose it or not

Change is always happening in one way or another. If you are not growing, you are dying.

The comfort we feel in the status quo is what keeps us from taking action, and we decay slowly instead. Use it or lose it is real. Every time you drop a skill or a habit, it gets much harder to go back to it.

The pattern most of us assume is a straight line: comfort, then discomfort, then pain, then crisis. We wait for the far end of that line to force our hand. You can take action at any point along it.

The boiling frog problem: when comfort becomes complacency

Comfort gets blamed for a lot of things it did not do. You can be comfortable and still push yourself for more. Growth requires some discomfort, but that does not mean all of it is pain.

The real danger shows up when comfort becomes an assumption and you stop paying attention to your environment. That is how you boil a frog. A slow rise in temperature is much harder to notice than a pot already at a rolling boil, and for the frog sitting in the water, the crisis does not arrive until it is too late.

Complacency in business works the same way. Sales flatten out a little. Nobody is panicking. The temperature is rising and everyone has gotten used to it.

You get to decide what rock bottom is

Sales have flatlined a bit, but the business is not tanking. Do you take action or not? It depends entirely on your definition of rock bottom for the business.

Some people wait until the roof is on fire to call the insurance company. Some people mitigate those risks far in advance.

I had a great time last month at the Brotherhood of Steel Retreat that Otis and I put on for Tribe and Purpose. Every guy who was out at the ranch learned something, and everyone walked away with a plan to make things better.

Was anyone in full crisis mode? Not really, maybe one or two guys. So how did the other ten make a change?

Each of us decided we had had enough. Things were not so bad and we could still fix them. Good enough is still allowed to want better.

Rock bottom is arbitrary. You decide when you have had enough and when you are going to change, which means you can declare wherever you are standing as rock bottom and start from there.

The inertia problem: waiting makes the change harder

The next problem you hit after deciding to change is inertia. The longer you wait, the harder it is to make that change stick.

We are creatures of habit. The longer we do something, the more shortcuts our brain builds for it, and the less time we actually spend thinking about it. Once something becomes a habit or a belief, it gets wired into the automatic system of the brain, and it takes intentional effort to pull it back out.

The longer you stay stuck, the more inertia you feel, and the more force you need to break it.

This works the same way on a team as it does with a personal habit. Tolerate an undesirable behavior long enough and it becomes part of the culture, which makes it far harder to root out. Small things get ignored or brushed under the rug first:

• Cutting corners
• Being dishonest
• Treating people poorly

A river is easiest to cross at its source. Do not wait for the problem to reach the size of the Mississippi before you start solving it.

Why is change so hard? Ego and the fear triad

We resist change because we think we are defending ourselves. At the end of the day, you have to dislike something about yourself or your environment enough to change it. If you want to be a lifelong learner, though, spending your whole life disliking yourself does not work either.

The comfort is not what traps you. The complacency that grows out of it does. You can be happy and still want to grow.

Ego makes us defend ourselves, and fear does the rest of the work. There is a fear triad sitting underneath most of the changes people never make:

• Fear of failure. Change is hard, especially when you are not sure it will be worthwhile. We think that if the big idea falls flat, the whole team will doubt our ability.
• Fear of success. This one is a version of imposter syndrome. We worry that even if the idea is right, we will not be able to sustain it, or that growth will expose us as the fraud we have been all along.
• Fear of the unknown. We like the devil we know. The end state of a big change is hard to define because things are complicated, so some apprehension is natural.

All of these fears feel much worse than they turn out to be in reality. Fear can be a powerful motivator for change or a reason to stay exactly where you are.

The sunk cost trap

The last pitfall is the sunk cost fallacy. Why fire someone you spent so much money training? Why give up on a project you have spent years of your life on?

Money you already spent does not make it a good investment to spend more. You can get critical about the time and money you are putting into something at any moment. You do not need a crisis to audit things.

Pick the thing you are stuck on and act

Just like the men at the retreat last month in the mountains of Southern Colorado, you do not have to wait for a crisis. There is no point waiting for one. It may never come.

If there is an area you feel stuck in, one that came to mind while you were reading this, make a plan to take action and fix it.

If you want to learn more about why change is so difficult, watch my video on why change is hard. If you are tired of being stuck and want to make a change in your life, apply to join the Steel Men Tribe and start taking action to make things better.

Deciding to change is the easy half. Next, here is how to motivate yourself and design a catalyst that makes the change last.

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