October 2020 - Message from our President
I’ll admit: I’m fascinated by space. I’m sitting, typing this article while looking up at a night sky illuminated by photons that have travelled millions of kilometres across the galaxy. Tonight, it’s the proximity of Mars that has me thinking about the future of our species and faraway planets dancing in the light of distant stars.
Scientists often speak of the universal constant: the speed of light from those stars. It’s a cosmic speed limit that prevents anything from travelling faster than light through the vacuum of space. The nearest (theoretically) habitable planet, Trappist 1e, is over 40 light years away. That means, even if we could move through space as fast as light, it would take us 40 years to get there.
It’s easy to get a little sad dreaming of distant planets, believing humans will never be able to travel far enough, fast enough, to explore potential future worlds for our species. We are stuck, here, to eventually be decimated by a passing asteroid or the death grip of our dying star.
Womp womp.
Pretty grim, eh? I’ll come back to why I don’t think that way any more in a moment, because I want to talk about something else we professional communicators tend to get sad and gloomy about: change.
Some of us view change as something that happens to us. We float through life and change is flung upon us. It’s an executive, economy, or global pandemic that creates havoc and forces us to adapt to external forces at play.
Change in our working lives tends to come in waves; sometimes it laps at our feet and sometimes it threatens to overwhelm us. However it comes at us, when control of our situation seems beyond our reach it becomes a recipe for anxiety, sadness, and stress.
I think our experience is dictated by that perspective of “things coming at us.”
Momentum changes perspective: time speeds or slows depending on how you move through space. I’d like to argue that change, too, can be managed much more effectively if our energy is spent creating the momentum needed to step into change: let’s not sit by and let change simply come at us.
We can take some control of our situation by constantly seeking out new tools, new information, and new opportunities. At IABC Wellington we hope to always connect you with each of those things— and this week we’ll do that with an in-person session where we’ll gain expert insights from Ngaire Crawford, Emma Blackmore, and Matt Waight. Let Thursday’s event help you step into the opportunities that change will create in the months ahead.
Now, back to that opening thought.
Several years ago I read about the theory of compressing and decompressing space around a spaceship to move a spaceship faster than the speed of light. The theory doesn’t break the laws of physics because, technically, the spaceship is not moving. Space is.
I changed my perspective. Instead of thinking about things hurtling toward me, that theory made me think about how to shape things around me to get closer to where I wanted to be. Faster than light travel might be a lifetime, or three, away from reality, but that doesn’t mean I can’t today use change to shape that future. And so can you.
Scientists often speak of the universal constant: the speed of light from those stars. It’s a cosmic speed limit that prevents anything from travelling faster than light through the vacuum of space. The nearest (theoretically) habitable planet, Trappist 1e, is over 40 light years away. That means, even if we could move through space as fast as light, it would take us 40 years to get there.
It’s easy to get a little sad dreaming of distant planets, believing humans will never be able to travel far enough, fast enough, to explore potential future worlds for our species. We are stuck, here, to eventually be decimated by a passing asteroid or the death grip of our dying star.
Womp womp.
Pretty grim, eh? I’ll come back to why I don’t think that way any more in a moment, because I want to talk about something else we professional communicators tend to get sad and gloomy about: change.
Some of us view change as something that happens to us. We float through life and change is flung upon us. It’s an executive, economy, or global pandemic that creates havoc and forces us to adapt to external forces at play.
Change in our working lives tends to come in waves; sometimes it laps at our feet and sometimes it threatens to overwhelm us. However it comes at us, when control of our situation seems beyond our reach it becomes a recipe for anxiety, sadness, and stress.
I think our experience is dictated by that perspective of “things coming at us.”
Momentum changes perspective: time speeds or slows depending on how you move through space. I’d like to argue that change, too, can be managed much more effectively if our energy is spent creating the momentum needed to step into change: let’s not sit by and let change simply come at us.
We can take some control of our situation by constantly seeking out new tools, new information, and new opportunities. At IABC Wellington we hope to always connect you with each of those things— and this week we’ll do that with an in-person session where we’ll gain expert insights from Ngaire Crawford, Emma Blackmore, and Matt Waight. Let Thursday’s event help you step into the opportunities that change will create in the months ahead.
Now, back to that opening thought.
Several years ago I read about the theory of compressing and decompressing space around a spaceship to move a spaceship faster than the speed of light. The theory doesn’t break the laws of physics because, technically, the spaceship is not moving. Space is.
I changed my perspective. Instead of thinking about things hurtling toward me, that theory made me think about how to shape things around me to get closer to where I wanted to be. Faster than light travel might be a lifetime, or three, away from reality, but that doesn’t mean I can’t today use change to shape that future. And so can you.