by PT-clc | Mar 14, 2019 | Beliefs & Values, Change, Changemaker
As a heart-centered leader and/or changemaker, it is important to support others within your team and/or organization to embrace change. This may be easier said than done. Here are a few “tried and true” strategies.
- Openly
discuss upcoming changes; (e.g. new leadership, reorganization) and ask
people to share how they are feeling about the changes
- Communicate about the changes and openly discuss how they may impact you and your team
- Ask how
people would like to be supported during the change process. I so relate to
Brene Brown’s work, the examples she shares in “Dare to Lead”, and the
importance of scheduling “rumbling sessions” during times of uncertainty and change.
For example;
“These changes are coming hard and fast, and I know there is a lot of anxiety … I want to spend the next forty-five minutes rumbling about how we’re all managing the changes” (p. 35).
- Encourage
those team members who are uncomfortable with change to start slowly and
integrate small changes into their daily routines (e.g. drive to work a
different way, when dressing if they usually put their right leg into their
pants first, start with their left leg, try sleeping on the other side of the
bed … . Change is like a muscle; the more
you welcome change into your life, the easier it becomes. Ariane
de Bonvoisin in “The First 30 Days – Your Guide to Making Any Change Easier”
identifies six “change demons” and their antidotes. The six change demons are:
fear, doubt, blame, guilt, shame and impatience. She explains that the change
demons “help us navigate through change by alerting us if we are off course and
encouraging us to choose a different emotion to help us get where we want to
go.” (To learn more visit: https://pamela-thompson.com/can-reduce-fear-change-power-beliefs/)
- View embracing change as a creative process that opens us up to new possibilities (a foundational belief of my “Art of Change Framework”- https://pamela-thompson.com/2017/10/), and speak with your team about the value of internalizing this belief.
- Use the
change process as an opportunity to be creative and innovative and create
space and opportunities for team members to share innovative ideas. William and
Susan Bridges in their book “Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change”
share some excellent examples of this.
I’d love to hear from you what strategies you’ve found effective to support others in your groups, teams and organizations to embrace change. I welcome your comments and ideas below.
by PT-clc | Feb 5, 2019 | Changemaker, Coping with Change, Embracing Change, Leadership
I so relate to this definition from
Ashoka (https://www.ashoka.org/) that “a changemaker is someone who is taking creative action to solve a social
problem.” They go on to say:
“Not every
changemaker needs to launch their own start-up or be the president of an
organization; changemakers can find opportunities to make a difference in any
number of roles. They may have no ties to an organization; they may take action
as an individual or as part of a group; they may organize as a part of broader
community or they may work within a formal organization. “[1]
Are you a changemaker?
If so, it is critically important that you understand change and how you
respond to it. Here are a couple of questions I encourage you to think about
and write down your responses to:
- When you think about change what words or emotions come up for you?
- Rate yourself on a scale from one to ten related to how you typically respond to change; “one” being “scares me to death” and “ten” being “I thrive on it’.
Many of us who declare ourselves as changemakers, including
those of us who are leaders of teams and organizations, respond to question #1 positively.
For example, when I think of change, words such as: “excitement”, “adventure”,
“opportunity”, “creativity” come up. Based on my experience with other changemakers
and leaders they respond similarly. In terms of question #2 many changemakers
and leaders typically rate themselves as a “nine” or a “ten”. That said, when
they ask the same questions to members of their teams or groups, responses to
question #1 may be “fear”, “uncertainty”, “anger”, “overwhelm”. And for #2 their
responses may be closer to “five” or “six” on the rating scale.
It is important to acknowledge that how you respond to
change when YOU initiate it is quite different than when it is imposed on you. If
change is imposed on you, your reactions and how you rate yourself on the scale
from “one” to “ten” typically change toward the negative.
So how do you as a
changemaker and/or leader, effectively navigate change and support others
around you to embrace, rather than resist change? Learning some facts about
change and openly exploring how you and your team respond to change is a good
starting point.
Some Facts about Change
- Our bodies are hard-wired to react to change, to protect us and keep us safe
Our amygdala (part of the brain) is constantly scanning our environment for potential threats including things that are different. When it notices something it perceives to be a threat, it sends messages to our bodies that put us into fight, flight or freeze. When we are angry, feel like running away, or our minds freeze, we are NOT in a good position to make any decisions, or to positively influence others.
2. Our past
experiences with change affect how we respond to it. For example, if when
you were a child a relative you were close to died and no one let you see the
person at the wake and didn’t discuss the person’s death with you, as an adult
you may fear death and not feel comfortable speaking about it. Similarly, if
when you were a child and when changes happened, you typically learned to “get
on with things” and to not express your feelings about leaving a particular
school, relationship, home … , then this will likely affect how you respond to
endings as an adult.
3. We store beliefs
and emotions in our bodies. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a stem cell biologist by
training, in his book The Biology of
Belief, documents research conducted by himself and others that all the
cells in our bodies are affected by our thoughts. Dr. Candace Pert, an internationally
renowned researcher and biochemist in her landmark book Molecules of Emotion, shares evidence of the biochemical links
between the mind and body. That being the case, if we have had negative past
experiences with change, that will negatively impact how we respond to change
in our personal and our professional lives moving forward.
4. The good news is that we can change the physiological structure of our brains (create new
neural pathways) with our thoughts. [2]
The implications of this body of work to us as leaders and changemakers, is
that we can learn, model and teach others how to embrace rather than resist
change.
Why am I so passionate about this?
If we
don’t learn to embrace change we:
- keep repeating the same patterns in our lives and remain unhappy & unfulfilled
- Feel constantly under stress leading to chronic health issues and negative impacts on our relationships & our businesses
- Expend a lot of energy resisting change
The
bottom line is if we don’t learn to embrace change, over time it negatively
impacts both our personal and our professional lives.
How can we reduce our
fear of change?
We can:
- Better understand how and why we
respond to change
- Learn a proven model and tools to
help us reduce resistance, and embrace and successfully navigate any change
The
more you understand change and the more self-aware you are about how and why
you respond to it, the more easily you can embrace and move through it.
What has been your
experience with change? How have you effectively dealt with change in the past?
I welcome your comments below. Feel free to share this with people who you
think might find it of interest.
[1]
https://www.evansville.edu/changemaker/downloads/more-than-simply-doing-good-defining-changemaker.pdf
[2] Doidge, Norman, The Brain that Changes Itself. London: Penguin Books, 2007
