What Riding a Motorbike in Vietnam Taught Me About Change

I awkwardly swung my leg over the saddle of the motorbike, pulling off what was surely the clumsiest motorbike mount ever attempted. As if this downpour were just a mist, my driver, clad in his lime-green poncho, waited patiently while I pushed the helmet down over my damp curls and strapped the buckle under my chin.

Just fifteen minutes prior, when the rain was but a mere drizzle, I'd opened up my Grab app — the Uber of Southeast Asia — but no cars were available. My only option was to book a GrabBike, the less-covered version. Once we both heard the click of my chin strap, we looked at each other as if to say, "Ready!"

We surged into the street, tires slicing through ankle-deep water as rain hammered on our helmets. We wove between stalled scooters and vendors hastily pulling tarps over their fruit stalls, spray from our wheels drenching the riders alongside us, their own splashes returning the favor in muddy curtains. I smiled as I embraced the chaos and observed the riders around me.

On my right, one bike carried a family of five: a father hunched over the handlebars, forearms taut as he threaded through the swarm, while the mother perched sideways at the back and their three little children squeezed in between, tiny legs dangling. No helmets, no worries.

Another biker had tied twenty empty water gallon jugs to every inch of his motorbike — neatly clustered and fanned out like a six-foot-tall bouquet of translucent flowers, the plastic jugs arcing outward like petals, wobbling gently as they caught the breeze. To my left, a wire cage of eight squawking chickens was tied tight to another bike, feathers brushing the bars. A young woman beside him wore five enormous sacks of rice like a backpack, the coarse burlap straps cutting into her shoulders as the load bobbed with every bump.

Everyone around me was carrying something unwieldy, moving through conditions that had no right to work — and yet, somehow, it all kept moving.

At first, I did what I usually do in unfamiliar situations. I tried to make sense of it. I looked for structure, watched for patterns, and kept thinking: Once I understand how this works, I'll feel better.

But I couldn't find anything to hold onto. And the more I tried to anticipate what would happen next, the more tense I became.

And then somewhere in the chaos, I stopped fighting it. I stopped trying to control what was happening and started noticing how I was responding to it. The motorbike driver wasn't panicking. He wasn't mapping the chaos or waiting for it to make sense. He was just moving through it, adjusting as things changed, and trusting that the people around him would do the same. While nothing became more controlled, it became more manageable.

Everyone is carrying something

As HR leaders, you know this dynamic well. During times of change, you help your business leaders build timelines, create new org charts, and prepare communication plans to help reduce uncertainty before asking people to move forward.

That matters. But to your people, as much as you think you’re transparent on what happens first, to them, it often feels more like that motorbike ride — fast, unclear, and already in motion. There seems to be no clear lanes and often no moment to pause and figure it out before starting. And everyone is carrying something: the fear of failure, an emotional connection to the past, an attachment to their current routines.

And yet, despite these fears, more often than not, people get through it. They adapt. They find their footing. The change that felt overwhelming in anticipation turns out to be something they could handle all along.

Sometimes we expected an emotional hurricane, but only got a bit of a rain shower.

There's actually a name for this gap between what we fear and what we experience: psychologists call it impact bias: the tendency to overestimate how much something will affect us. 

People underestimate their remarkable ability to adapt to almost any circumstance, and they forget the core elements of their lives, like the routines that ground them and the opportunities for growth, that continue to influence how they feel, often more than the big change itself.

What's activated within us matters more than what's happening around us.

Whether a change is welcome or unwelcome, chosen or imposed, the external change alone has limited power. 

The question that changes everything

The HR leaders who navigate change well aren't the ones who have it all figured out themselves either — they're the ones who've learned to move anyway. And they make it easier for others to move too.

Instead of asking "Am I ready for this?" — try asking "What would it look like to trust myself that I'll figure it out as I go?"

It's a question worth sitting with yourself first, before you bring it to your team. Buried in that question is something most people forget when change arrives: you have more agency than you think. Not over the situation, but over how you respond to it. Over whether you wait for certainty or start moving without it. Over whether you treat the discomfort as a sign that something is wrong, or as a normal part of finding your footing.

That's what the motorbike driver was doing. He had no way of knowing what was ahead — a pothole, a scooter cutting him off, another curtain of muddy water. He just trusted that when it happened, he'd adjust. That trust wasn't naive — it was earned from every ride he'd taken before. Your people have a version of that too. Part of your job is helping them remember they've done some version of this before and they were able to move through it without knowing all the answers in advance.

The goal is never perfect conditions. It's the ability to move forward without them.

And sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is click your chin strap, look at your team, and remind them — you've ridden through storms before, and you figured it out then too.

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If this resonated, Sarah Aviram works with organizations and HR teams navigating change — helping leaders and people move through it in a way that actually sticks. Learn more at sarahaviram.com.

And if you're curious about the stories and experiences behind this perspective, they're explored more deeply in Sarah’s new book, The Scenic Route.

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