Change

"The only constant in life in change".... This saying has been around
of as long as I can remember, yet even though change is a constant in
our life, we fear it. When we wake up, our body is different than it
was when we went to sleep. Our world in the morning is very different
than our world the night before and even though we notice it, it
rarely seems to bother us. If change is all around us every day, why
is it that we fear it? It seems to me that we should be use to it and
if not embrace it, at least not fear it. Why do we fear change?

Several years ago, I changed jobs and moved from one side of the
country to the other. Even though this was somewhat of a homecoming
(I was moving back to my home city), this change engendered such fear
in me that for a period of months, I developed phobias such as health
fears and claustrophobia. After a couple of months, these issues
passed, but why did they occur in the first place?

As I get ready to leave my job and move to a new company, I'm
experiencing some of my old fears. What if I made a mistake? What if
I don't fit in the new company? What if I can't deliver on the
expectations of my new management? Even though the work I'm going to
be doing in the new company is very similar to the work I did, and was
successful at, in my current company, I still am experiencing fears of
failure.

Maybe some of these fears are good because they encourage us to excel,
but I suspect that most of them are unrealistic and potentially even
destructive. Facing our fears are suppose to make us stronger, but
what if this makes us only more afraid? Cliches abound such as "the
only thing to fear is fear itself" and maybe the prevalence of these
sayings indicates that most people are afraid of something....