“There’s only one thing to do: learn all we can.”
— Dorothy Vaughan (Hidden Figures, 2009)
The 2016 historical drama Hidden Figures is one of the deeply inspiring stories I watched. At its heart are two changes happening at once: the arrival of IBM machines that threatened to make human computers obsolete overnight, and the inclusion of African-American women in NASA’s mainstream departments. Both unsettling. Both transformative.
Change is constant, and it is necessary. Especially as you step into a managerial role, change isn’t a possibility; it’s a guarantee. The question was never really about the change itself. It was always about the response.
Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, didn’t wait to be told what to do. She taught herself, then quietly taught her entire team — turning a potential redundancy into NASA’s first programming unit. That is emotional intelligence in its most practical form: seeing clearly, feeling the weight of it. She realized that while she couldn’t stop the machine, she could control her reaction. Dorothy reframed a massive threat into a brilliant opportunity by teaching herself and her team the programming language of the future.
“Learn all we can” captures something real. Learning about the change. Learning about the people around you. Learning what you might need to unlearn. And perhaps most importantly, learning about your own emotional triggers so you can respond, not react. When we deeply understand our emotional triggers, we stop merely reacting to institutional shifts and start regulating our choices.
Psychology calls this psychological flexibility: the ability to be fully present, to be less reactive and more responsive to your internal and external experiences, and take action aligned with personal values, especially when the ground is shifting under you.
If you are navigating a conflicting shift at work, here are 3 ways to manage change:
- Name the emotion before it claims you: When change conflicts with your interests, start with labelling what you’re feeling. Acknowledge and validate the threat (“I’m anxious about losing relevance” rather than “this change is a bad idea”) and address the vulnerability. This would ease the resistance that comes out in the form of logic or ego.
- Reframe the situation as a question: Reframe your thoughts in a more constructive light in the outcome frame than the blame frame. Cognitive reappraisal allows you to detach, look forward and reduce stress. Like reframing of ‘I failed’ to ‘This time I was unsuccessful’ shifts the focus of attention from a dead end to there’s still a way out.
- Invest time and energy to find your fit: Invest in learning, look for the hidden gap where you fit in well, The gap between “waiting to be trained” and “choosing to learn” is where self-leadership lives.
Change rarely arrives with your permission. But how you meet it — that part is always yours.
