Successful Change Starts with Positive Attitude

For too many of us, change is a big negative. It is seen as work, as a threat, as an inconvenience. But what about change in the face of reality? To make a necessary change is simply acknowledging reality. Avoiding such change would be pathological. But avoid it we do, because deep down we fear the unknown more than the known - "better the devil I know..."

But if you have to do something, you might as well enjoy it, shouldn't you? That's what having a positive attitude is all about. We have many changes that we know we need to make in the coming years and too many of us seem to be dreading them, instead of thinking creatively about how to turn the change to our advantage, have some fun with it...

Pat Murphy at Community Solutions has a new blog posted today (Plan C Bailout Strategy – Dealing with Cars) that talks about ground transportation and suggests that we use the bailout process to retool Detroit automakers to manufacture buses instead of cars. While I like that suggestion a lot, that's such a huge cultural leap to ride in buses instead of cars. The solution addresses the wrong problem - the problem is not that we lack buses - we lack riders in too many cases. People don't like buses when they have access to cars. In America, people who ride buses are those who don't have a car. Only in very dense urban areas do we ride buses in any great numbers .. oh yeah, and charter trips.

But those of us with some travel experience have different, fun stories about riding mass transit while abroad - "everyone does it over there and it works....huh, go figure!" Mostly, its cheap and very, very convenient, unlike here, where it tends to be cheap and very inconvenient. We come home to the States and wonder why we don't do that cool thing over here. Of course, there are lots of reasons why not, but mostly when I've had the conversation, it winds up being attitudinal, something like "nice idea, but that would never work here - it would be too hard to change everything." End of story - buses would be going backwards - less convenient.... Next!

Pat captures that attitude with his penultimate paragraph.

There seems to be a horrible fear in the American psyche of any change that can be experienced as “going backwards,” a fear of what it will mean to reject the “progress” we have made by developing Hummers, jet airplanes, nitrogen fertilizers, McMansions, credit cards, credit swaps and derivatives. The thought of going back down the ladder of so-called progress from cars to buses to bikes to walking fills us with despair. So we cling to faith in innovations – such as light rail, pluggable hybrids and government bailouts – that are already best understood as fading dreams, misguided steps toward an increasingly barren future. More optimistic people, people who never really thought that all this stuff was the core of life, have a different view. They see the coming change as an opportunity for creativity. Why not just bail out Detroit with a government bus program? Maybe growing food in the backyard with neighbors could be a source of joy. Wearing sweaters doesn’t seem all that great a sacrifice. Buses might be a way to meet interesting people. Could dealing with climate change, Peak Oil and bad debts actually be fun?