Managing Change

I always thought of myself as someone who loved change. Change is what makes things better and I have always been a fan of Grace Hopper’s quote that the most dangerous phrase in our language is ‘we’ve always done it this way’. Then Covid hit and in the weeks, months, and years that followed I was thrust into a world of change not of my own making …

February 2020 I bought a new house, my first house in fact, and I decided to ask my boyfriend to move in with us (that’s me and my then 8 year-old daughter). That was all change of my own creation and change I was happy with and had laid the foundations for. Covid meant we were suddenly all in the same living and working space 24 hours a day and whilst I thought we were muddling through it, I was later to find out it wasn’t quite the happy families I had convinced myself of.

In April 2020, the literal cracks in our new home began to show when my other half woke up one morning and put his foot out of the bed and into a pool of water. Of course the assumption was a leak somewhere and over the course of the next 18 months we had plumbers, followed by roofers, followed by damp experts followed by surveyors as we fought to have the problem fully investigated, identified, and rectified. We moved out for 10 days in October 2020 only to continue to see evidence of increasing water damage. After more than a year of pushing the developer – including getting my own surveyor and being lied to by the contractor about water leaking elsewhere in the building – we were moved out again in December 2021. The plan presented suggested it would be a one to two month ‘decant’ but it was a Gantt chart full of questionable milestones so this time we insisted on another apartment and not a hotel. Our belongings and all our furniture were moved or put into storage and we didn’t move back into our home until August 2022.

During our time living in temporary accommodation, it was the metaphorical cracks in our family that started to show. We were all argumentative with each other and my daughter especially wound me up with her lack of care for the house we were in. Whether it was ours or not, I felt it should be treated with respect. I know now she felt unsettled and angry towards anything connected with the major disruption to her life especially coming so quickly on top of Covid and my new relationship. Like me, she found it hard to embrace the change that had come without her choosing and wasn’t easily recognisable as a step towards a positive end goal. With all this as background, I was still trying to make more positive change in my life including selling my business in October 2021 and going back to University to study an MSc in Data Science. The toll of change became a heavy burden on my shoulders – almost too much to bear.

I tried to find ways to make temporary accommodation a more positive experience. I bought my daughter the Home Alone house in Lego for us to build a little bit every week until we moved back and it was finished about two weeks before we made it home. We travelled when we could (costly but necessary!) but when we moved back I realised my daughter had not seen the positives in the whirlwind of chaos it had been and the backlash of her difficult experience was directed against me. My 8 year old was now 12 and, as I bore the brunt of her battle with her own cycle of hormonal shifts, I grieved the loss of my little girl. More change I didn’t want but had to accept as inevitable.

As that pace of inevitable change has continued and my little girl has begun her transition to a young woman, I know I need to ensure I am a strong role model when managing both types of change: the change you want to bring about and the change you don’t. In my own professional and personal life I see myself as an agent of positive change – always seeking to improve my own performance and the performance of those around me. But change is more than just improvement. As my daughter grows up I gain a greater insight into the type of change that hurts. The type of change that makes things feel worse not better. Parents love to say we wish we could freeze time and right now that feeling is overpowering. I want time to stop for all of us.

For as my daughter becomes a young woman, I start my journey through real middle-age and it doesn’t promise better times ahead. Aches, pains, falls, hormone imbalances, digestion challenges – and my list could go on. So how do I get myself to a place that embraces this change too?

I changed my screensaver to HMS Resolute – the Arctic ship of the Royal Navy trapped in ice in 1854 and recovered and returned to Queen Victoria two years later – not necessarily because I wanted reminding of failed expeditions (although remembering failure is part of life is no bad thing) but because I wanted daily reminders that all our time is limited and therefore my action must be purposeful. All change is hard but if I act with purpose, and be prepared to slow my pace in order to ensure I am checking in with that purpose, then all will be well. It won’t be perfect. It won’t be without bumps and falls. But it will be the life I want to live and help me to be the person I want to be.

Because the best woman I can be is the best gift I can give my daughter as she becomes the best woman she can be.