Meet your Host. Andrea.
Dear Readers and Future Listeners,
Thank you for making it this far in getting to know Change That Podcast.
My name is Andrea. I’m a trained designer and natural daydreamer. Which means I enjoy questioning everything, and dreaming up of solutions in life and work.
Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, I now live in New York City, where I earned my BBA in Strategy, Design, and Management from Parsons School of Design.
The project-driven program at Parsons equipped me with design thinking approaches, collaborative methods, and interdisciplinary perspectives to tackle contemporary issues and contribute to the public good.
This podcast emerged during the completion of my final year capstone project, which explored a year of change and how our new habits are re-shaping our culture.
My research findings led me to ponder:
What will we crave in a post-pandemic world?
The area of opportunity was very clear. A whole new world is waiting to be re-designed, re-imagined.
In response, I created this series to shift perceptions of change, share impactful stories, and inspire others on the possibilities of tomorrow.
My Experience with Change…
Fear of failure. Fear of imperfection. Fear of change. Fear of the new. Fear of the unknown. Fear of outcomes. Fear of not being true to myself.
These have been the underlying themes of my year so far. A fear that has grown from things being too different from all I know and grew to be used too.
Throughout my life, I was trained to handle the certain, I’ve been taught methodologies and frameworks designed to be applied in predictable scenarios.
So what happens when your habits, environment, and reality constantly change, all at once, at an increasingly rapid rate, affecting multiple areas of your life, that you don’t even recognize anything anymore. Fear develops. Fear of the unfamiliar and not knowing what’s coming next. A fear that numbed and refrained me from taking action after many attempts and setbacks.
I tried to piece myself together, clinging to old ways that once brought me success. I aimed to move forward, hoping that reverting to the familiar would help me cope with this new reality. I failed after several attempts to proceed in the old direction, to my comfort, to what I knew and was familiar with, highlighting that clinging to the past only delayed the inevitable transition to a new standard.
My thesis journey was deeply inspired by my struggle with the frustration and internal conflicts of change. It drove me to explore this topic further, seeking to understand how it applies to systems and how I might influence it more effectively.
One personal reflection to note after having dived deep into theoretical and experimental research on the topic, is that change is a transition from old to new, from broken to improved, from mistakes to lessons, and from problems to opportunities.
When faced with change, trying to revert to old ways will only delay the new modes of actions required to create a new, evolving reality and a new normal.