Perpsective

Change is the only thing we can count on these days. Everything is changing. The staff here are struggling with how to function given all the change they have been through. New Building. New Organizational Structure. New responsibilities. More traffic through the door and at the desk. New courseware to learn and use. New technology to get comfortable with. New protocols, new levels of service. More work. More students. I am sympathetic towards their struggles to adjust.

For me, the workload here is less than half what I have handled in other places, the stress so much less. But I know how difficult it can be to have the rug pulled out from under your feet and not know which end is up. So I have asked them to list all the changes. Then I asked them to list everything that did not change. At first, they could only list one or two things. With a bit of prompting, the list grew and grew until they finally saw that what had not changed was much more than what *had* changed.

See the big picture - the light at the end of the tunnel begins to glow a bit. You could almost hear the gears turning. WHAT we do has not changed all that much. Just HOW we are doing it now. And that will continue to evolve as things always have. I think of my Grandmother's lifetime. She started out with horse and buggy and ended up with rockets on the moon. She began with a garden in the back yard and ended up with supergrocery stores. She was born before telephones, and ended up with email (even though she personally didn't use it). What a huge paradigm shift she went through. Slowly.

And that seems to be the issue now. The shifts happen so quickly its hard to get any perspective on what will be long term and what will be a flash in the proverbial pan. So when you feel overwhelmed, list the things that are predictable and unchanged. It does help to keep perspective.