In a recent conversation, a wise colleague and friend told me, ‘when we advocate for change, we need to keep at it no matter what the result is. Change often takes years to come and often we don’t see it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t advocate for it. You need to keep putting the vision out there. Calling people to it. There is a bit of the prophetic in the change maker.’

Ideas, frameworks, plans, discussions, budgets, dreams, visions. All of these are good, helpful even. But they tend to lack one thing. Action. All of the initial list can be a form of hiding. Of not doing the work. Of talking about it, but not implementing.

Implementing or action does not guarantee ‘success’ or change, but it can guarantee learning.

Change making is all about action. Without action, we atrophy. So change is all about calling people to a better way of being. And change making is also all about failing. Perhaps mostly about failing. But not failing in the sense of mistakes or not working. Rather failing in the sense of learning. Failing, when viewed properly, is about insight, feedback. And when viewed this way, we can even intentionally fail overall because we are seeking insight about a specific detail. Now reread that sentence replacing insight with learn.

And yet through it all, we need clarity of purpose. Clarity of pursuit. But also clarity of identity. For change makers to thrive, we need a strong ‘inner game’. We need to know ourselves. And know the change we seek is not about us. That the two are separate.

So what are you going to about today?

Photo by Brett Jordan