Why It Is Difficult to Change From Reactive to Innovative and What To Do About It

I have been a student of consciousness principles for over twenty years in addition to human behavior psychology and organizational development.

As a leadership and change expert I have seen many leaders and their teams who have made the effort to change and yet have reverted back to habitual behaviors that make change difficult or thwarts the vision altogether.

Why?

As human beings we often ‘know’ what we ‘should’ be doing and yet we bypass that intelligence to choose behaviors that keep us either status quo or with minimal energy.

Why?

The answer is simply some people have lost the ‘hunger’ to stay alive. What I mean is that when we were more primitive as humans we all had to stay alert, we had to hunt and find our food and we had to protect ourselves against predators.

In those conditions the majority of humans were lean, constantly vigilant and looking for ways to improve life conditions. Life was shorter due to constant death threats of nature.

Fast-forward to today and we are all too comfortable. One could argue that we have to work to survive or that we have predators in the form of violence. But think about it, we don’t really have to respond to the threats that our ancestors endured.

The modern threats include keeping up to technology, keeping your job, and protecting what you have accumulated. But none of these threats are big enough for most people to change. Typically change doesn’t happen for many until it is forced.

You lose your job, you get divorced, you have a health scare or you lose your material possessions. It is then and ONLY then that most people realize something has to change.

I am on a quest, a mission if you will to help people to ‘make change’ before something forces them to. This means we must replace our hunger for survival with a hunger for change, for innovation and for growth.

When you are focused on growth you look forward to change and all that the change entails because you know that there is ‘richness’ on the other side of the change. You are willing to do what is necessary in the moment to get to the goal.

It is difficult to change from being reactive because we have become to comfortable with comfort.

We must disrupt, unsettle and even create some pain in order to innovate and be proactive. Think of it as having a little bit of pain in the process of changing rather than waiting for an explosion of change (and frankly greater pain) that you are forced to react to.

So how do you go from reactive to innovative?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Get out of one comfort zone right now- been meaning to be healthier and lose a few pounds or get fitter? No more excuses get the ‘app for that’ such as Fit Bit or many others.
2. Read and watch videos on innovations, inventions, young people coming up with novel ideas and get inspired to think more creatively more consistently.
3. Catch yourself when you are reacting and reframe it with innovative thought so if you react to the thought, “its hard to get fit” reframe it to, “I can’t wait to have more energy when I am more fit”.
4. Have you gotten complacent at work? Force yourself to learn more from one of your colleagues in a different department, take advantage of your company’s training/learning budget, ask your boss to coach you (or help you find a coach) on an area that you know you can further develop.
5. Set a goal that is something that fires you up and stretches you and force yourself to set up novel experiences.

Innovation happens when we ‘mix’ up our experiences and we mix up our situations so that we can bring our multiple perspectives into play. Think of Neo on the Matrix he was able to navigate the challenges of both worlds by ‘training’ his mind and his skills to mastery.