A Letter From Chris Suarez
"YOU HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT!"
This weekend I ran into an old client while picking up a few things at Home Depot. I’ll be honest, I didn't recognize him behind the mask. He called my name while I was standing in line and it was all I could do to figure out who I was talking to while only really seeing his forehead, eyes, and the bridge of his nose.
We pulled down our masks a bit and out came the rote expression we find ourselves saying every time we see a friend after a few years of separation: “So great to see you,” and “Wow, it's been forever,” and of course the “You look great! You look exactly the same as last time I saw you.”
Now naturally, the last expression is rarely the truth. In fact, in this case it was grossly inaccurate. He looked at least 10 years older, when I'm certain the last time I saw him was about three or four years ago.
With that it got me thinking about how much older I must look to my friend, who of course exchanged the same formality back to me, assuring me that I looked younger and healthier than I did even the last time he saw me. I rolled my eyes, but told myself, "I certainly couldn’t look a full ten years older as he did."
A few hours later I was on a Zoom call with some friends of ours that moved to California right before the pandemic hit. We’ve known each other for years and they recently moved out to the West Coast from Canada. They have a nine year old boy that ran across the Zoom screen while we were chatting, and I must admit I almost didn't recognize him. It has been just barely six months since I saw him last, but he looked dramatically different.
I realized at that moment that we are all changing. Some of us dramatically, some of us less dramatically. Some of us very noticeably, some of us less noticeably. Some taller, some shorter. Some thinner, some heavier. Some a little more put together, some a little more of a mess. Some stronger, some weaker. Some tighter, some more wrinkled.
And although both of these instances were an example of physical changes, I began to think about how we are all changing mentally, emotionally, metaphysically.
The fact remains, we all look different from three or five or ten years ago. We need only look at a few photos of our children from a few months ago to realize how dramatically we change even in short periods of time. It’s that photo or snapshot in time that we can look back on and then compare to how we look today that clues us in.
Dr. Jamie Metzl explains that the reason we do not realize the changes that are happening every day is that those changes are incremental. We are just incrementally changing every 24 hours, and we see ourselves and/or our children ever single day. Those incremental changes are almost undetectable.
But what goes undetected is often uncontrolled.
Everyone part of our organization is on a path to a preferred future. That future is preferred because we want something different or we want to become something different. Believe it or not, the physical changes we experience along the path are actually easier to see than the other changes. So how do we know if we are growing as humans over time? How do we know if we are that person that looks better with age?
Creating white space in the morning or the evening to record your thoughts is a critical step to detected and controlled change.
Write about who you are being today.
Write about what you are thinking today.
Write about where you are in your journey today.
Write about how you are feeling today.
Write about why you are doing what you are doing today.
Unless we have a picture from the past to compare to our present, it will be difficult to know if we are different.
In this case most of us want that snapshot from the past to look dramatically different than our present and our future. At times we may feel like we are running in place, not making progress, our business is exactly where it was a year or two ago, or worse, we are the same person that we were a year or two ago.
And yet, as I review a snapshot of your business each week, and I look at a snapshot of your leadership each week, and I listen to a snapshot of your thinking each week, and I see a snapshot of your experiential living each week, it allows me to see you each taking steps down that path to your preferred future.
View those daily entries into your journal as that snapshot. It will give you an opportunity to look back a few months later or a few years later and see how your thinking has changed, how your feelings have changed, how what you are doing has changed, how your journey has changed.
Change needs to be detected so that change can be controlled.
Just seeing ourselves in the mirror every single day doesn't allow for a good gauge on whether or not we are taking steps down the path to our preferred future. Looking back on those journal entries a year or two down the road allows us to see who we are becoming.
If left to chance, we could slowly be gaining a few ounces every day, until one day we look back and realize that based on our habits or lack of activity, we have added ten or twenty or thirty pounds to our physical body. We could be adding that same weight over time to our mental or emotional being as well without even noticing. Keeping a record of who we are becoming is necessary if we are going to control that. As I look across our organization, so many of you think differently. You act differently. You are in different places in your life. You feel differently about things. So many of you have become different people.
Oh sure, we all have those friends that will tell us “You haven’t changed a bit,” but I assure you, you have.
And change looks good on you.
Yours in incremental change,
Chris
