Casey Chan
After reading chapter 11 in the “Exploring Leadership” book titled Understanding Change for my EDEA 360 class, Dynamics of Student Leadership. I was able to quickly relate this topic to my life as a child, for I was a victim of being unable to comprehend and deal effectively with change, more specifically, change that is out of my control.
As an infant (ages 0-4) I was completely oblivious to change; wherever my mom and dad were, I was happy. My first large experience with change was when I was living in Roseville Minnesota. I was 10 years old and I remember a tall, strange but friendly man coming to our house to talk to both of my parents about “adult things”. During my school’s spring break, my parents told both my older brother and I that we were going off to the land where I was born, Hong Kong. I was excited because this was the first time I was going to go back since we moved away the first time. That experience was extremely fun for I ate great Chinese food that I could only get when visiting grandma in San Francisco, half way across the nation. We explored the city of the place that we once lived, and my parents showed both my brother and me around explaining our family’s history that we had in the concrete jungle.
Upon returning, my father questioned me about my experience while we were in Hong Kong. I told him I loved it. As a tourist. Weeks later, my father comes up to me and tell me that our family is going to be moving from our suburbian 3 floor house in Minnesota, to a one floor apartment in Hong Kong. I was furious for I didn’t want to leave my friends or the house that we were living in. I loved the neighborhood and all of my friends that I’ve made. When we did move that summer, I became extremely salty/bitter and I hated both of my parents for forcing me to move to an unknown city where I don’t know anybody or my way around.
Relating my experiences with the studies in the book, “Exploring Leadership”, Kubler-Ross had a five-stage model about how people react to change. Another researcher named Conner expanded on Kubler-Ross’ idea by adding 3 more phases. Up to this point in time, referring to the eight-stage model, I went through 5 phases.
While referencing my first experience with the book about understanding change from an individual perspective, when my family lived in Minnesota and I was enjoying it, I was in the first phase, where I was completely stable and I was content in the “present state”. When my father told me that my family was moving to Hong Kong, I immediately transitioned to the second phase, which is Immobilization. This phase is when one, me in this example, is shocked about the outcome or the change. I was able to transition in and out of phase two fairly quickly. The third phase is denial and after my family moved to Hong Kong; everything seemed surreal, as if it didn’t really happen. I kept telling myself that we were going to move back to Minnesota and everything I left was going to be exactly the same as I left it. After the third phase, I entered the fourth stage, which is anger. I was unhappy that my parents forced me to move to this unknown place where the people were unfamiliar and the people seemed very rude. The fifth stage that I went through was Bargaining. At this point, I couldn’t deny the fact that the change had already happened, but I was trying to bargain with my parents whether or not we can shorten the amount of time that this move was going to happen. I attempted to get both of my parents to shorten the amount of time that we were going to stay in Hong Kong so I could go back and live the life that I was living before.
The second large change that happened in my pre-college career was that my brother graduated from High School. This one wasn’t as large as when my family moved from Minnesota to Hong Kong, but it was still somewhat hard on me. I also don’t think that it was as hard on me because I was also older, 13 years old at the time, so I was more mature than I was when I was 10 years old. This change is worthy of putting into my blog because as a child, I always thought that my nuclear family, no matter how old we got, we were always going to stay together and live under the same roof. It didn’t occur to me that once my brother graduated, that he was going to move away from the home or nest that we both grew up in, to be on his own, or that I wasn’t going to see him almost every day and fight over who is going to use the family computer. Similar to how in the TV show Family Guy, nobody in that family ages.
Similar to moving to the incident when I moved to Hong Kong, I went through various phases as described in the “Exploring Leadership” book, however I skipped a few. Phase one, stability, was prior to my brother graduating and me thinking that we were always going to live under the same roof and my parents are always going to take care of both my brother and me. I didn’t go through the next 4 phases, Immobilization, Denial, Anger, or Bargaining for there wasn’t enough time for me to between the time my brother graduated to when he left the nest. I went straight to depression because things became very different. I became an only child within the household. My parents focused their attention on me, nagging me to do homework and were generally watching out for their baby boy. After my brother left for a good while, I was able to enter the seventh phase, which is testing. I was able to regain my ground and reformed my goals to become more independent so that my parents wouldn’t need to have to watch out for me as much.
The last big change that affected me happened my freshmen year of high school. What happened was that upon entering my first year of high school, I was given a schedule, which was suppose to be the same for the whole year. Months into the school year, I got used to my schedule, my teachers and more importantly, I got used to my classmates by making friends with various peers. The event that was to happen was that one of my teachers had to stop teaching the section that I was in, completely changing my schedule forcing me to readjust to a new schedule that I didn’t like at all. I wanted to keep the schedule that I was comfortable with since I knew the people in my classes and my teachers. I finished that year extremely salty/bitter about what happened and I hated school and what it did to me.
At this point in the experience, I went through the first six stages, skipping the fifth stage. These stages that I went through were stability, immobilization, denial, anger and depression. Elaborating more on anger and depression, I became extremely angry with the school for forcing me to go through such a change. I didn’t like it and I wished that the school would burn so I wouldn’t have to go through it again. While going through the fourth phase of anger, I was also going through the sixth phase of depression. I didn’t have the energy or motivation to continue to excel in school so I did the bare minimum to pass, which wasn’t acceptable to either of my parents.
My father noticed the toll that this change did on my effort in schoolwork and he decided to take action. He recommended that after my sophomore year, I should go to a boarding school that is smaller and so the teachers get to know me on a more personal basis given that I get accepted. Along with the recommendation of going to boarding school, my father told me to read a very easy-to-read book that helps people put change into perspective. The book is called “Who moved my cheese?” I will elaborate about how this book is significant in my evolution on how I deal with change further down.
I got accepted to the boarding school and I decided to go and try it out. There I was able to appreciate school and I excelled a lot more but I realized that this whole boarding school image wasn’t really for me and I desired to return home. After a semester of being at the boarding school I returned to Hong Kong and continued to go to the school that put me in the slump that I was in two years earlier.
While I was at the boarding school, I was able to officially go through the seventh phase of testing, in all of the major changes that I went through in the time span of 10 years. I was able to realize who I was and who I wanted to become. In the book I noted earlier, “Who Moved My Cheese?” I originally was the character Hem. Hem was someone who hated change and would get in a huge slump and not want to do anything about it, wishing that everything would go back to how it used to be. However what I wanted to become was more like Sniff and Scurry who have no problem with change and know that change happens no matter what so they can continually move on with their lives. Upon returning from boarding school to the place where I was eight months earlier, I was finally able to enter the eighth and final phase in regards to all of my experiences. This final phase is acceptance.
Regarding to my move to Hong Kong, throughout the 8 years that I lived there, I adapted to the lifestyle and the people. I started to love living and being there and even thought about moving back after I graduated from college but if my life didn’t lead to me moving back, then that would’ve been fine too. With my brother graduating from high school and going off to college, graduation was becoming more of a reality for me, and I realized what he went through and was able to accept that he went through the same situation that I was at the time. My last big unpredicted change that happened, I just came to the conclusion that shit happens and unfortunately there’s nothing that I can do about it.
I was able to accept unpredictable changes and I felt like I became a totally different person. I accepted change and I became more and more like Sniff and Scurry who were affected by change but didn’t let those events hurt them negatively. If anything, after going through these different incidents and being able to put a perspective on them, I now constantly seek change to put a variety in my life.
