We face daily situations that we resist and only later to accept. This post suggests a way to accelerate this process and make it happen in the shortest time possible.
Situations of resisting and accepting vary over all scales.
- A man approaches the woman of his dreams but she refuses and resists his temptations. It is not rare that many women who resisted first accepted later but the question is why?
- Negotiations almost all start with a proposal that one party offers for the other party to resist and later to accept it.
- A new manager replaces an old manager with whom staff had a great deal of understanding. The employees resist the new manager only to accept him afterward.
- Teams tend to resist new members for various reasons. They isolate the new member and resist his nice approaches to be one of them. Later, the teams accept the new member and welcome him.
- Brothers who resist the newborn baby and treat him as a source of disturbance. Later on, they accept the baby and welcome him warmly to the family.
The previous example shares one common factor and that is the disturbance of their current comfort zone.
They see the change as pain and so resist change. As long as the comfort zone is less painful than the imagined pain of moving from their comfort zone is lesser than pain of change.
That is to say, as long as the current pain is tolerable/manageable people tend to resist change?
One solution to dissolve this resistance is to make the pain of the current state greater than the pain of change. Disturb the current comfort state and make it painful for people to accept change.
Let me explain by one example.
Let me start with this example. Soldiers in war finding comfort in fighting less than losing the war. But when the pain of war escalates the soldiers may surrender because the pain of being taken as prisoners is less than the pain if they get seriously injured.
Another example is unemployment among university graduates. They refuse to work in jobs not related to their studies.
When the pain of unemployment intensifies they accept jobs that they resisted before.
In short, people change when the pain of change is lesser than the pain of accepting change and its associated pain.