Over the weekend, I did something new.

For awhile I have felt the need to bring change into my life. I’ve spent the last year or so in a cocoon, hoping to emerge as a butterfly. But you can only lie fallow for a little while before you risk becoming overtaken by weeds.

A piece of advice that I often give people I’m working with is:

If you want change to come into your life, invite change into your life

This summer I am inviting change into my life by trying things I haven’t tried before.

I have begun doing things that will help me meet new people, people who are doing things that usually lie outside my usual circles.

This weekend, I joined a nature and meditation walk in Central Park.

Meditating in Central Park can be a challenge.

Especially if you have fallen out of practice. There are a lot of noisy distractions. As I sat silently, for 15 minutes, in The Ramble, here are some of the things that I heard:

• Passersby chatting.
• Wheels of strollers and wagons squeaking and crunching along the path.
• Traffic.
• Car horns.
• Sirens.
• A busker playing jazz music.
• People laughing as they played on a distant field.
• A helicopter hovering overhead.

And these were all very distracting. Until I thought about something that one of my professors in grad school said:

“It’s all just data.”

To a change manager, that means that everything people do provides data about them.

They complain, they forget, they rebel – it’s all just data that you can use to help them navigate the change.

Every time the CEO cuts you off, every time an executive states that it’s not their fault, every time a video editor complains that they’re being asked to edit the fully-finalized video one more time, it provides another dot in the dot-to-dot picture that you’re amassing that helps you understand how the organization works, what people within that organization struggle with, and what kind of support they need, in order to be able to change.

It also protects you as a change manager, because it takes some of the sting out of being cut off, frustration out of the blame-shifting, and irritation out of the complaints. Because it is all just data, you keep your eye on the big picture and don’t take it personally.

Instead, you become curious about it. What is the CEO trying to avoid when s/he cut you off? Why is it so important to that executive to not be at fault – what is s/he trying to get you to do? Where did the communication break down before it got to the video editor?

How can you use this in your work?

It was all just sound.

So, instead of rejecting all that city noise while I was meditating, I told myself it was All Just Sound.

Just sound waves bouncing off my ear drums.

I didn’t need to reject it or try to block out noise. It was just sound.

And once I accepted it as a data point, something fascinating happened. I began to hear:

• The rustle of small animals in the undergrowth.
• New bird calls that I hadn’t heard before in The Ramble.
• Leaves striking each other in the gentle breeze.
• My breath coming in and going out.

Without my struggle against noise, I noticed my other senses:

• The pattern of sun and shadow against my closed eyes.
• The smell of the earth and of the heat.
• The whisper of the breeze against my skin.

All because I gave up the struggle with the city and accepted where I was.

Waking up to sirens.

Jack Kornfield, on the CD I used when I first started to meditate, told of a man who lived near a firehouse and struggled with sirens interrupting his meditation.

The advice: use the sirens as a way of telling if you are fully present.

Whenever the meditator heard a siren, he could check in with himself and, if he realized that his mind was drifting away into thought, bring it back to the present moment.

The sirens became an aid to his meditation instead of an interruption.

Is there something in your life that you could treat as data?

Feel free to reflect in the comments.