Sometimes it feels like things will never change. That you are stuck. And that you will always be stuck.

Perhaps you’re stuck in a job that you’ve outgrown, or searching for a new job. Perhaps you feel like you fight the same battles every day, and you’re getting tired of them. You long for things to change but instead they continue.

I believe that, when you want change to come into your life, you have to invite change into your life.

But how do you do this?

Asking for Change

When my mother was struggling to sell her dream house – she had finally agreed that she couldn’t live alone in this giant house in the woods any more – I asked her why she thought it wasn’t selling. She said that her realtor told her that she needed to stand in front of her house, open her arms to the sky, and ask the gods to send her someone who would love that house as much as she did.

Have you done that? I asked her.

She smiled in that way I knew so well. She had not done it.

But, when she did, the house sold right away.

I thought of this a few years later when I was ready to leave the company I had grown up in. It was really hard because I felt a strong duty of care for the people I served: the front-line booksellers, store managers, district managers and regional VPs, and my awesome team. I didn’t feel I could leave them without a strong champion. But I was burned out. One night, after working long after everyone else had gone home, I stood in my office, raised my arms to the ceiling tiles, and asked the universe to send me someone who would care as much about my people as I did.

It did.

And then I could close that door and move on to new challenges.

Sympathetic Magic

Another approach is to invite small changes into your life. If you want change in your life, take a different route to work. Or sit in the lunchroom, if you don’t usually, and talk to people you don’t usually talk to. Go to a professional networking meeting or join Toastmasters – you don’t have to wow them, just show up and say hello.

Reach out to people you haven’t talked to in a long time. Just drop them a note, tell them you were thinking about them. If they respond, keep the conversation going by asking about their lives. If they don’t respond, it’s not about you, move on to someone else.

Volunteer for something. Have something different for dinner. Buy a new shirt, something that doesn’t look like other things you own, but still looks like you.

Don’t usually speak up in meetings? Speak up!

Changing little things primes the pump. It demonstrates to the universe that you are ready for change.

And then change will follow.

I’ve written before about a young man who worked for me, who always fought my changes. And yet, his highest Strengthsfinder trait was Adaptability. He was smart enough to recognize that another of his strengths – Empathy – was blocking his Adaptability: when I proposed changes, all he could think was how painful that might be for his colleagues. As we talked, he found a way to leverage his Empathy to make change easier for his peers. That small change in perspective snowballed into a promotion, a marriage, a new apartment, and a baby.

Wow, sympathetic magic in action.

Put Yourself in Charge of Change

One of my tricks, when I am rolling out large-scale change, is to identify those people who will find it most challenging to change.

And then I put them in charge of the change.

That seems counterintuitive but, oddly enough, it can work.

By putting them in charge of successfully implementing the change, you are redefining success for them. Where, in the past, they might have been successful by upholding the way we do things around here; now they will be successful by redefining the way things get done.

I also find that many people who resist change do so because they feel a lack of control or understanding. They understand the current process or state of things; and they feel confident and in-control of it (even if it is out of control, they have their own ways of dealing with that, that are in their control). Putting them in charge lets them in on the inner secrets of the change, so that they understand it, and they have control over it.

You can leverage this yourself. Find something you want to change and assign yourself to work on it. Don’t like the way a meeting is run? Research great meetings and start leading your meetings that way.

Recently I got tired of being late to meetings when I was coming from other meetings. And others were late, too, when they had back-to-back meetings. So I put myself in charge of this change, and started scheduling meetings to start at :05 or :35, giving people a 5-minute break between meetings. I didn’t ask permission; I just did it. Everyone says they love it. We get just ask much done in 25 minutes as in 30 minutes. And people actually get that 5 minute break, whereas meetings scheduled to end 5 minutes early, never really do.

By putting myself in charge of changing this problem, change has come into my life.

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Those are three ways that you can invite change into your life.

But I warn you to use them strategically.

Because, when you invite change into your life, change comes into your life.