Navigating change

How do you deal with constant change? How do you stay motivated and grounded?

Write it down. In as few places as necessary. If you can build good note taking and personal documentation practices, you’ll carry valuable knowledge through those changes.

Work in the open. Share your workspace with your whole team, avoid keeping things siloed from others. If your team is sharing knowledge by default, then your notes have even greater context.

Build relationships. Find your allies, your champions. Find your friends. Make connections deeper than the work at hand to build collective resilience. You’ll need those relationships to weather the most difficult changes.

Know your motivation. Figure out why you do what you do. Intrinsic and extrinsic. Scrutinize your reason for being where you are, poke holes in it, cut to the core. It’s your compass. Know thyself, or something like that.

Draw your boundaries. You have information. You have relationships. You have your motivation. Now set a threshold, a limit, a milestone for how much and what kind of changes you’re willing to tolerate. Give yourself a concrete measure. And be okay if or when you hit it. It doesn’t mean you need to take drastic actions right away, but it tells you where you’re at. It’s a check engine light, or a gas light in your car.