Are You an Essential Worker?

This sign has appeared outside London Tube stations and speaks to the realities of life during a pandemic. A few people get the green light to travel and everyone else goes home.

But life has never been much different in some ways. Some people travel along life’s tube getting green lights all the way, while others don’t get far. Everywhere they turn they encounter one red light after another.

Are you one of the lucky ones who travels with green lights? Or do you constantly encounter red lights no matter how hard you try?

There’s something real and unreal about getting green lights. The unreal bit comes from observer bias. It’s easy to look at another person and imagine how easy life is for them when everything keeps going so well all the time. But we don’t really know how they experience reality, or what struggles they deal with. Maybe they do have it good, but maybe they’ve overcome a lot to get there.

The real bit is that some people know how to turn disadvantage into advantage. It may look like life is one series of green lights for them, but what you don’t see are all the red lights they enounter and manage to find ways around. They don’t let failure stop them. They are flexible and prepared to change course. They look for good opportunities. They seek out all the green lights they can find.

Perhaps some are just lucky – born in the right place at the right time. But many are change fit. They have disovered the success pattern of change and are good at making change work in their favour.

Bertrand Piccard is a Swiss adventurer who circumnavigated the world in a balloon. He learnt an important lesson from this experience. You can’t control which way the wind blows. But whether you succeed or fail has a lot to do with how you respond to the wind. It has a lot to do with the choices you make given the winds that blow. Change fitness helps people respond to the winds of change in ways that open new pathways for them. They navigate towards green lights.

So, what kind of lights do you tend to get? Are you frustrated because the lights are often red? Are you waiting for more favourable winds? Well, change fitness can give you the power to respond to change in ways that advantage you.

There are green lights waiting for you. Go find them.

Written by Dr Steve Barlow