Learning to deal with change

I was talking to an acquaintance whose son recently finished school and started a new IT job. He was sharing his son's uneasiness and shock at the rate of change in IT and the need to keep up. I could relate to it immediately as I used to feel the same way before a mind shift helped me deal with it. Each person should come up with their own formula but the below is how I deal with it and I hope it helps you come up with your own.

Learn how to learn: We learn in school a particular field of study and are released into an ever changing world. That equips us to get a foot in the door of a particular company/industry/business. Once there, we get comfortable and we expect our employer to train us to keep up with the changing world. We hope to be spoon fed all the time. We need to know how to learn on our own. Internet has democratized information so there is no excuse for laziness.

Have a growth mindset: Always be curious. Learn something new everyday. The day you stop learning you start to regress. It is not that you don't progress but you actually regress since the world around you is moving forward and you just stopped moving in the same direction. Make it a habit to learn something new everyday. You never know how it will come handy.

Learn to communicate effectively: Improving your communication skill is a life long endeavor. No one can claim that they have graduated from it. In the past if you had the gift of the gab, people would say that you could excel in sales or marketing. Today, it is a basic skill to market yourself. Excel in it and it will take you places you never dreamed of.

Relationships matter: Magic happens when we continuously invest in building relationships. In my career, most of my job offers and promotions came about not by me applying for one. Most of them came about because I worked for/with someone or I knew someone and he/she recommended me.

Be flexible: We hate change. Uncertainty makes us uneasy. We want assurance that our situation will improve or remain the same even if we are not happy with our current situation. Fear paralyzes us and makes us not achieve our true purpose in life. Think of the worst thing that can happen and then the best thing that can happen because of the change and the odds are somewhere in the middle and you can work on improving the odds.

Beyond this, it is out of your control so why worry about it. Go with the flow and things have a way of working out in the end.