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mores and expectations.

Communicate About Fears
To overcome our fear of change and deal with it confidently, we need to talk loudly about hidden fears and anxieties and confront them without flinching. Suppression never does anyone any good except keep us in fear. It merely brings out the anxieties in other ways (like recurrent illnesses, absenteeism from work, low confidence and continued inadequacy and resentment). A denial of our fears, a lack of communication of our true feelings and a resistance to change, mainly serve to keep us trapped in futility and insecurity. Yet if we knew that this week would be the very last week of our lives we would pull out all the stops to do some of the things we have longed for, or to try a new experience.

Coping with change can be traumatic, especially when we are unprepared for it, it seems irrelevant and we have convinced ourself that we cannot learn or appreciate it. But the only way to increase our confidence in a world of uncertainty is to face these insecurities squarely, to identify what we each can do to influence our new situation, to update the skills we need to acclimatise, to befriend, encourage and simply learn from the young and go for it! No matter how frightening the image, how strong the emotion and how little the perceived reward connected to a new change, we have to learn to take it on board in some positive way otherwise our development will be stunted while more amenable colleagues make the most of it and ultimately reap the benefits.

If we are stuck in the past and unduly preoccupied with ways and actions of old, we will lose our credibility, becoming fossils of denial while we merely exist on the periphery rudderless, vulnerable and helpless and increasingly incapable of appreciating the amazing developments and actual benefits of living in our own dimension.

Learn more about this author, Elaine Sihera.
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