Sometimes, You Have To Be Forced To Change

I thought it only fitting to admit this out loud, because I have spent decades telling other people’s teams to do exactly what I refused to do myself.

I am, in most rooms, the one arguing for new systems, new tools, new ways of working. Ask anyone I have trained. I have never once shied away from pushing a team toward technology they were reluctant to touch. And yet, for years, my own to do lists lived in a book. My notes lived in a book. My calendar, in the year of our Lord whatever it currently is, lived in a paper planner I carried around like a relic.

My daughter Shaakya has never let this hypocrisy slide. Practice what you preach, she would say, more than once, in that particular tone daughters reserve for fathers who should know better.

I agreed with her every time. And did nothing about it every time.

So she and my son stopped waiting for me to talk myself into it. They bought me an iPad. They bought me a small keyboard, because they know me well enough to know I would have quietly refused to type on glass. They loaded every app I could possibly need onto it. The only thing they left untouched was my journal, because they understand something I have never had to explain to them, that I cannot pour my private thoughts into a screen and have it feel like anything at all.

Tip #1: Notice what people protect when they push you to change. My children did not force everything on me. They knew exactly which part of me should stay exactly as it was. Good change never demands total surrender. It knows what to leave alone.

I am not fully converted. But most of my work now happens on that iPad, and I will say this plainly, it has not been half as bad as I spent years assuming it would be.

That is the part that sits with me longest. Not the switch itself, but how long I avoided something so manageable, simply because I had decided, without evidence, that I would hate it.

Why did I wait so long? Why do any of us wait so long?

Tip #2: Stop arguing and start experiencing. I could have listened to Shaakya’s reasoning for another five years and still been carrying that planner. What actually moved me was being placed inside the new way of working and discovering, on my own terms, that it did not hurt. No amount of logic does what one week of lived experience does.

There is a version of me that would have called this stubbornness. I now think it was something quieter and less flattering, a small fear that I would look foolish fumbling with something my own children found effortless. At home, that fear is manageable. You laugh it off over tea. In a boardroom, among people you are meant to be leading, it is a different animal entirely.

Tip #3: The nudge has to come from somewhere outside you. Change rarely arrives because we finally convince ourselves. Someone else has to make the first move, often without waiting for our permission. My children did not ask if I was ready. They simply removed my excuse and placed the alternative in my hands.

I keep thinking about how many people sitting in my own workshops have folded their arms exactly the way I once folded mine, waiting to be convinced by argument alone. Argument rarely does the convincing. Someone has to create the moment first, and let the person discover for themselves that the new way was not so bad after all.

Tip #4: Let the trial stay small. I was not asked to abandon my laptop or my books overnight. I was allowed to keep the journal, keep some of the old rhythm, and move gradually into the rest. That gradual permission is exactly what let the resistance in me soften on its own.

So here is my honest confession, after forty odd years of telling other people to embrace change, it took my own children forcing a tablet and a tiny keyboard into my hands to remind me how the whole process actually works.

You will not always win the argument. Sometimes you simply have to create the moment, and trust that the person will come around once they see, for themselves, that it was not so bad after all.

Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Sometimes your teacher is the same daughter who once needed your help with her homework, now sitting beside you, patiently showing you where the keyboard button is.