The philosopher Heraclitus once said: ‘There’s nothing permanent in life except change”. From the very beginning of humankind, people are always looking forward changes in various aspects. They change to adapt to a new environment, change to improve their living conditions, change to make more money and simply change to find out who they are. Changing has become an extremely important spice of our life. However, we barely recognize or pay attention to how we have changed, thus making a successful change process is completely not easy. As for me, not until I had read the book ‘Our Iceberg is melting’ by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber, did I figure out how I had gone through eight significant steps mentioned in the book to achieve a successful changing.

I recall the day Ha, our class vice president, ran toward me in panic and announced that we were assigned to hold the Science Seminar. In spite of being the most boring annual event, the Seminar had a very strong connection to my school’s reputation. If we had continued to fail like the last two times, we would have lost not only the opportunity to hold the Seminar again but also our ranking gained over years. However, as the class president, I was not allowed to lose my composure. ‘Well, it seems that we have no other choice but to find a way to make the seminar more enjoyable,’ I told my worried friend, trying to soothe her. ‘I believe we can handle it, but first we need to call for a meeting to inform everyone about this information.’(Create a sense of urgency).

For the rest of that day, I could not stop thinking about the assignment: ‘What is the answer for this problem? How can we make the most monotonous event more interesting?’ Those thoughts filled my mind, challenging my imagination, not to mention my capacity for logic and reason. Listening to the ideas from other students, I found no feasible solution (somebody even suggested giving it up). To avoid the stress coming, I buried myself in the beautiful melody of “Canon in D”. And no sooner had the music ended than an idea dawned: “Why don’t we compose a musical play to convey information about Science rather than using boring documents and speeches as usual?” It sounded great, but turning the idea into reality would be a challenge.(Get the right vision). After I had explained my idea to Mr.Binh, the Principal and Ha, they were very eager to embark on the project immediately. But we also needed other two people to create a powerful guiding team: the president of Physics Club, Minh (he was amazingly smart) and our Art teacher, Mrs.Hoa.(Build the guiding team).

Possessing an excellent communication skill and the respect of people in the school, the Principal helped me to convey my idea to the other students and teachers, asking them to try their best to make it reality.(Communicate for buy-in). He also declared that any students who participated in the activities would receive not only less homework than those who did not but also additional points for their exams. In fact, the new policy managed to encourage nearly every student in the school to get involved in the project. In addition, to make sure that the preparation for the seminar could be done effectively, I decided to divide the guiding team into groups, each in charge of different tasks including: collecting useful science information, writing the plot, designing costumes,