We keep waiting for things to settle. What if they’re not going to?
I have three children moving into their teenage years. And two careers running alongside that. If you’d asked me a few years ago what change management looked like in my life, I probably would have described a client engagement, a leadership program, a business restructure.
I wouldn’t have described a Tuesday morning.
But a Tuesday morning is where I actually live change. It looks like a fourteen-year-old who last week was easy and this week is unreachable. A workflow that made sense in January and needs a complete rethink by March. An energy level that gets recalibrated constantly by what my kids need, what my clients need, what I need. And the continuous, quiet requirement to shift my own mindset to move with all of it rather than against it.
Some days I’m good at this. Some days I notice I’m fighting the current, frustrated by something that has changed, privately wishing things would just stay still for long enough to catch my breath. That frustration is real. And it used to confuse me, because I work in this space. I should know better, right?
What I’ve come to understand is that knowing better doesn’t make you immune. It just helps you notice sooner.
Our brains are not built to process change. They’re built to predict. Moment to moment, the brain is running a continuous model of what’s coming next, drawing on pattern and experience to get ahead of reality. It’s extraordinarily efficient. And it’s why change feels like such an interruption.
When something shifts — a child’s emotional landscape, a company’s strategic direction, a colleague’s behaviour, a global event — the brain’s prediction model gets disrupted. That disruption registers as a threat signal and the nervous system activates. Resistance arrives, completely naturally, as the brain’s way of saying “this doesn’t match what I was expecting”.
We tend to treat resistance as a problem to overcome. A weakness. Something that better leaders, more resilient people, don’t feel. But resistance is a biological response. The question isn’t how to not feel it. It’s whether you recognise it when it shows up.
The leaders who navigate change best aren’t the ones who feel less disruption. They’re the ones who’ve stopped being surprised by it.
For a long time, I held change as something that happened periodically. Something to get through, manage, and come out the other side of. Under that frame, stability is the default and change is the disruption. The goal is always to return to steady.
I don’t hold it that way anymore. Not because change has become more comfortable, it hasn’t, not really. But because that frame stopped being useful.
In my home, change is not arriving. It is already here, and it will keep evolving. My children’s needs will shift again before I’ve finished adjusting to how they shifted last month. My own capacity will fluctuate. My work will demand different things at different times. The terrain is moving. And the question I’ve had to ask myself, more times than I expected, is: am I trying to hold it still, or am I learning to move with it?
That shift, from change-as-event to change-as-environment, is not a small one. It asks us to stop spending energy on the wish that things would stabilise, and start spending it on building the capacity to function inside instability. It asks us to update our prediction model, not just once, but continuously.
In practice, for me, that looks like checking in with myself regularly. Not just when something obviously changes, but as a habit. What’s shifted this week? What am I resisting right now? Where am I expending energy on something I can’t control instead of something I can? These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re far less expensive than the alternative, which is carrying unacknowledged resistance into every room I walk into.
I want to say something directly, because it’s the thing I see most often go unspoken in leadership conversations about change.
Leaders feel it too.
Not just the operational challenge of leading a team through uncertainty. But the personal, physiological experience of having their own prediction model disrupted. The low hum of discomfort before a difficult conversation. The private wish for more certainty than exists. The frustration that arrives when a plan that made sense six months ago no longer does.
We don’t talk about this enough and the cost can be high. A leader managing their own unacknowledged resistance while trying to steady everyone else’s is working with a significant handicap. The room feels it, even when they can’t name it.
So before we get to strategy and communication and tools, which matter enormously and we’ll get to in part two, the starting point is this: change as a constant is first a personal mindset. You have to live it before you can lead it.
What would it change for you if you stopped waiting for things to settle, and started building for the reality that they won’t?
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