Bruce Kasanoff* discusses the time when fear prompted his dog to store up some insurance against worrying changes.
See the three dog biscuit pieces, neatly arranged where two sofa cushions meet?
That sofa stretched about three metres from end-to-end, and when I got home one evening in 2015, biscuits were carefully hidden like this from one end to the other.
My dog, Dex, did the arranging.
At the time he was a 12-year-old rescue dog who was home alone and apparently nervous, so he got into a plastic bag full of biscuits, opened it, and hid as many biscuits as he could fit in the sofa.
He didn’t eat the biscuits; he hid them in case I didn’t come home and he needed food in the future.
Dex did this because we were in a new house, and he felt uncomfortable being left alone.
He spent part of the first year of his life starving on the streets of Brooklyn, and apparently our 2015 move caused him to remember not having enough to eat.
When we first adopted Dex, he always stole the bread and hid it under my pillow.
Here’s my question for you: If a dog is this smart about fearing change, how good are people at it?
We have all sorts of strategies for avoiding change.
For example, someone recently told me that two statements were enough for a person to resist all change at work:
We never do that here.
We already tried that here.
You can label change as dangerous, rash, haphazard, inappropriate or premature.
You can embrace change when it involves other people, but resist it when it involves you.
You can talk about change, but not actually change.
At some point on that day in 2015, my dog thought: “I can still fit more biscuits under that last cushion over there.”
He could have put 20 biscuits under one cushion; he didn’t.
He put two or three biscuits under each cushion.
Never underestimate the ability of living, breathing creatures to fear and resist change.
It’s what keeps us alive, but it’s also what keeps us from progressing.
*Bruce Kasanoff is the founder of The Journey, a newsletter for positive, uplifting and accomplished professionals. He can be contacted at kasanoff.com.
This article first appeared at kasanoff.com.
