Did I say I was going to blog daily? Oof, integrity. Let’s gooooo….

I have been thinking about change lot. In February 2020, the most popular business buzzword in my circles was “disruption” — loosely defined as the ability for a business to change an industry so innovatively and unexpectedly that they would create a sustainable lead. “Disruption” had come to inspire reverence, as the preferred state of being. Everyone wanted to disrupt, everyone wanted to be a disruptor, and if you didn’t disrupt your competitors, you were doomed to mediocrity.

March rolled around, and every single person (and business) in the world was disrupted by COVID-19. And we got to face the other side of disruption — when we, our businesses, and our lives are disrupted. When you take the veneration off “disruption” and think about the kind that happens to us, it means sudden, abrupt, wholesale change that we didn’t ask for or plan for.

More instructive than watching people try to disrupt was watching people respond to disruption.

With all my IRL events cancelled for the next 90 days and myself literally grounded with no end in sight, I embraced Zoom as a platform for connection. Pulled together a group of like-minded trainers and public speakers and launched a series of webinars to help people brush up on the skills that would help them make sense of chaos and find light in the darkness. We called it Leading Through Disruption and it carried us to the next phase of the pandemic, after the initial panic had subsided. We created a community and strengthened bonds and helped each other through the darkest early days. I am grateful for this experience, even though it was borne of such hardship for others.

I have lots more on my mind about change, so this is probably the first post of several on the topic of change.

When life handed you the change of your lifetime last March, how did you respond? How did you embrace this change?