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I hadn’t heard about an agent of change until my ninth-grade health class, this was shortly after we’d learned about Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits; that really was a great class. Simply put, an agent of change is a person who facilitates change whether it be individually or in an organization. Something else I’d learned in this class that stuck with me was that agents of change aren’t just people who change, they’re pioneers of sorts, moving away from the comfort of the familiar to that of the unknown. It’s certainly easier to make personal and organizational changes when you haven’t been entrenched in an old system, it’s still change, but it doesn’t have the vigor of deeply imbedded habits behind it.
We’re going to focus on individual change for the sake of simplicity, and because all large-scale changes first begin with the individual. One of the biggest hurdles to becoming an agent of change is learning from past mistakes, and above your own, that of your predecessors. So often we rely on our own experience to guide us, we may entertain other’s anecdotes, and read motivational material, but the power to make change comes from within. It was Julius Caesar who said “experience is the teacher of all things,” his sentiment has echoed through time. To progress as an individual, you must heed the warnings of those who came before you, there simply isn’t enough time to experience all things and learn everything for yourself; it’d seem that as we get older our parents get wiser. Seeing past previous familial mistakes is one of the most difficult things to do as you have both genetics and habit reinforcing negative behaviors. Being an agent of change requires seeing past mistakes; visualizing a future that is different and ideally better than the present you’re currently involved in.
To see past previous mistakes and visualize a better future is the only way to progress as an individual and a society, as George Santayana famously wrote “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Becoming an agent of change doesn’t happen overnight, it takes many attempts, countless mistakes, and a variety of experiences to reinforce the idea.
We must all become agents of change to reform individually and as a society.
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