To change or not to change?

I've been hearing a lot lately about people not wanting to change or, more specifically, not wanting others to try to force them to change.  The line that accompanies this (everyone say it with me) is "I am who I am."

Now, Popeye the philosopher to the contrary, I've come more and more to believe that this phrase is bunk.  Let me explain.

There are times, clearly, where we are what we are, and it is unreasonable for others to expect us to be other than what we are.  I am a thinker, and to expect me to instinctively feel instead of thinking, well, let's just say you'll be disappointed almost always.  Others are spontaneous, or serious, or detail-oriented.  If we can accept that, and learn how to work with it, we'll all be better off.

But there is a key phrase there, and a key concept hidden behind it.  "Learn how to work with it."  Having managed groups of people many times, I know that it's imperative to understand who they are as individuals: what they value, what motivates them, how they like to operate.  If I ignore these things, my group fails.  But if I adapt the way I work to set them up for success, we all win.

So I adapt.  I know I need to.  We do it all the time.  When we are interacting with a 3-year-old on a playground we talk and act different from our behaviors and speech in a corporate meeting or when we're out for dinner with a group of old friends.  We do it consciously at first but it soon becomes unconscious; we just naturally adapt.  Another word for adapt?  Change.

So we can change, and we don't expect to say "I am what I am" in every context.  So when do we use it?

When we don't feel like changing for the other person.  At least sometimes, then, it's not the other person who is the issue, but our own choice to stay the way we are.  We are often more committed to being who we want to be, how we like to be, than to being in healthy relationship with the other person.

And of course it's also ludicrous to think that we don't or won't change.  As we learn and grow, as we live, we become different from who we were.  The old bromide "You can't go home again" refers to the fact that we change, and others change, and we can't just go back to the way we all used to be.

As you are confronted with opportunities to change today, remember that you do have a choice.