Change, it's something that comes with life, but some changes can make you anxious about future changes. Fear of change is incredibly inconvenient, because while your life may be the same for a while, it often doesn't last very long. It is therefore good to do something against the fear of change and to have resources to arm yourself against change so that you can cope with it
Change happens everywhere in life. Your private life can change because of all kinds of things, people come and go in your private life. Moving house or something similar can dilute a friendship anyway, and people do die sometime and that is also a big change. Getting sick can also be a fear for you.
The fear of change is also a fear of loss of control. Change makes you unable to properly plan where you are going with your life and that change will throw a spanner in the works.
In this blog, I take a brief look at fear of business change and fear of personal change.
Fear of business change
A reorganization, layoff, promotion, a new manager, anything can happen in the company where you work. Even if you are an independent business owner you are affected by change, clients come and go.
Research shows that executives in particular who have the power to achieve certain goals suffer more from fear of change than people who don't have too much say in where the company is going anyway. This is because they lose the sense of control more than people who did not feel in control anyway.
Especially when change is imposed from a higher layer of management, the fear of change causes change to go wrong. This is because the fear is then also the fear of danger (is my job still safe?), the fear of pain, and the fear of anxiety because you have to do things differently. This is actually the fear of making mistakes.
The fear of change also refers to the fact that change can be challenging because it goes against your own beliefs about how the world works and how the company functions within it. Depending on your confidence in that the company can handle change, you also have more or less fear of change.
Fear of personal change
Fear of change has big consequences. A little fear of change is very normal, but sometimes the fear of change can have big consequences.
In fact, there is a clear link between major life changes and getting a mental disorder, such as anxiety, depression and sometimes it can even go so far as to cause schizophrenia.
This is why it is so incredibly important to overcome the fear of change and to be able to change with them when the situation calls for it.
Young people, for example, can be greatly affected by breakups and other reasons why the family suddenly changes. This can also cause you to fear changes in your personal life in the future.
Cause of fear of change
Whatever fear of change you have, it is important to find the cause of the fear of change. By knowing why you fear change, you can do something about that reason.
There are several ways to identify the cause of your anxiety. With anxiety, regression is often used to find the cause. Regression is a hypnosis technique that allows you to go back with your subconscious to the moment when the anxiety arose. This can provide many surprising results because many beliefs originate in childhood. Something totally illogical can cause the fear. Finding this out can already cause the fear of change to diminish a lot.
Practical tips against fear of change
Overcoming the fear of change is something that is very useful to do because it has many benefits when you do not resist change but rather change with it (on your own terms or not). Therefore, first a few practical tips to overcome the fear of change.
Tip 1: Get out of your comfort zone
The fear of change is actually also feeling very comfortable in the situation you are in. Nothing is wrong and everything is taking its course. Change is also something unknown something where you have to do new things to make it something familiar. To have less fear of the unknown and have confidence in your own adaptability and creativity, it is helpful to do something outside your comfort zone regularly, at least once a month.
By doing something outside your comfort zone, you actually confront the fear of the unknown and learn that you can do more than you think.
Tip 2: Accept the situation and create your own conditions
In order to change with you and thus reduce the fear of change, it is important to accept the changed situation. This is just the situation you are in, then you can work on your own conditions. How do you make the best of this situation? Is this a situation you want to be in and ask yourself what you can do, what is in your power, to make the situation better for yourself.
Tip 3: Determine your learning moments
The fear of change can also be the fear of making mistakes in the new situation. By thinking about those mistakes not as mistakes, but as learning moments, you ensure that the change is a lot less scary. Nothing in life goes perfectly and life always goes on. So why not learn from moments that don't go right once? By looking at how to handle it differently in the future, a mistake becomes more something to look forward to rather than fear.
Hypnosis and fear of change
These practical tips are very helpful, but you may find that you still have roadblocks to implementing those practical tips and therefore you cannot overcome the fear of change.
So hypnosis can already help you figure out the cause of your fear of change, but hypnosis can help for other tasks as well.
To determine learning moments, for example, it is important to overcome fear of failure. Hypnosis also helps against fear of failure. To accept the situation as it is, mindfulness is needed, and then to control the situation to your own will, confidence in your own ability is needed. To go out of your comfort zone requires self-confidence that you can manage outside that zone.
Hypnotic suggestions against anxiety
Hypnosis has several ways to tackle anxiety and one of the ways is with suggestions. The purpose of the suggestions is, that these suggestions are more present in your subconscious than the beliefs that create the fear of change.
A hypnosis expert will first ask you about why you are fearful of change in order to find out "unhealthy" beliefs. To this he will then put suggestions. You repeat these suggestions daily at home during self-hypnosis or listen to them during self-hypnosis if the hypnosis expert has recorded them for you.
Suggestions may include:
"I can adapt to any situation."
"I am creative and knowledgeable."
"I can learn from new situations."
"Everything always works out."
These are just examples of hypnotic suggestions; depending on your beliefs about change, a hypnosis expert may give you other suggestions.
Hypnotic Confrontation
Overcoming fear is also done by confronting fear. This is largely done with going outside your comfort zone, but you can also confront your specific fear. You then make a list of your top 10 change fears. Then you will work with the hypnosis expert to overcome them piece by piece. This is usually done first during a visualization. Through a visualization, you can better imagine how to deal with a change which also makes that change a lot less scary.
During the guided visualization, there is a chance that you will feel the anxiety. The muscle tension, the change in your breathing and other symptoms of anxiety. Then you will learn from your hypnosis expert how to control your physical reaction to fear in order to calm down immediately and keep your confrontation with the fear rational. This will give you increasing confidence in being able to cope with change.
So overcoming fear of change can be done in many ways, with practical tips and with hypnosis. Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to a playshop or other event of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08853134.2004.10749012
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/full/10.12968/bjsn.2016.11.6.299
https://wsimag.com/wellness/22073-overcome-your-fear-of-change-in-7-steps
