The Key Point Of Change

“Change!” It is a rule of universe. Everything needs change to survive. Companies and people keep changing.  For the past 2 years, I have been in charge of my company’s transformation program which involves many projects. Firstly I have to say, I have no experience in change or transformation management. In this period so many consultants gave presentations about change in different areas and I have read some articles about change management. There are so many factors about change management but I realized one thing is the most important for individual change. It is “Comfort Zone”.

For example you want to do jogging at 8:00 am in the weekend mornings. But when you wake up, you don’t want to get out of your bed. In this basic case your bed is an example of “Comfort zone”.  Also to leave up your comfort zone, there should be a good reason. İn change management it’s called “sense of urgency”. For example İf you feel yourself unhealthy, it can be a good reason to leave up your bed for jogging. Another good example is our table topic sessions. We force our members to leave their comfort zones. Because public speaking comfort zone is prepared speeches.

Then I started to think about my life, my comfort zones which I have left to change something in my life. The major change is choosing İstanbul for university education and leaving from Samsun which is my hometown. In the first 2 years of the university I got used to İstanbul and University life. And so that it became my comfort zone. And then I started to work part-time in a call center and I learned so many things with that experience. After a while it also became my comfort zone then I leave up. Then I leave up another comfort zone again and it went on like that in my university life and my social life. And with that I got progress in my life. In my opinion changing something in our life, give us progress.

 Yes I left up so many comfort zones, on the one hand I have to admit that I also couldn’t left up so many comfort zones in my life. One of them is jogging every morning. I haven’t leave up my bed yet.

Anyway, changing is not all about like that. For example when you want to need to think different about a case which you stuck, you should change your mind set. İn that case what can be the comfort zone about it? I said I am not a professional about it but changing mind set is directly related to opening your mind for different views. So that your comfort zone can be your social environment, friends which you mostly spend your time. You should try to understand and listen different views from different social environments, different cultures.

As a result if you need change about anything in your life or yourself, in my opinion there are two main rules ;

 First one; Define clearly your comfort zone about what you want to change,

Second one; Leave it up. The key point of change is “Leaving up your comfort zone”. But I have to say, it is not easy all the time.