Tag Archives: Resistance to change

Finding Resiliency In Times of Change

Posted on by

Social distancing has turned the world upside down for most people.  Think about all the change that happened when states, then companies started to adapt the way they operated.  I’m sure you and everyone around you felt the uneasiness, uncertainty and may even have been afraid of what could happen personally and for your work.

Resilience is the ability to move through such change or chaos quickly using the least amount of energy reserves.  Many people equate resilience with “bouncing back” after being depleted.  With change being constant in our daily lives, living in a state of persistent depletion will negatively impact your cells, your body, mind, family and co-workers.  Consistently being in a state of high stress is not healthy or normal.  Stress depletes your cells, muscles and mental capacity internally and likely impacts your family and work relationships.  Fortunately, resilience is a skill that can be learned by anyone.

Preparation is key

You don’t have to wait to be depleted to prepare yourself with enough energy to adapt to changes/stress quickly and get back to living your best life.  Having energy reserves is like having money in the bank.  You’re being proactive and storing energy regularly to have it available when you need it.

Ways to build your resiliency

Here are 4 approaches to build your resilience that you can start today.  Ideally, you will embed these four approaches into your life BEFORE you have a major change or issue.  However, it’s never too late to start. As you practice these actions, they will become natural habits.

Consider your choices: We all have choices in how we deal with any situation.  You can act/react out of fear and negativity or you can choose to look for the positive possibilities in the change.  For example, you have a choice to learn about the COVID-19 virus or you can perpetuate the fear with everyone you talk to.  Sharing accurate knowledge about the disease is more positive than being so fearful you become paralyzed.

Reassess your perspective: Are you seeing the whole picture in a difficult situation?  Is it possible you’re missing information?  Seek clarity to make sure your perspective is accurate so you don’t waste time worrying about something that doesn’t exist.  How often have you assumed someone, maybe a boss, would be upset that you’re 10 minutes late in the morning because it took longer to get the kids to school?  Your manager was likely too busy with his/her priorities to notice.  That’s a wasted use of your reserves.  Do the best you can during the moment.

Prioritize positivity:  We create most of the stress we feel by allowing our negative thoughts to sabotage us.  How often have you had an argument with someone in your head and it never materialized.  Yet, you reduced your energy reserves to have that one-sided argument.  How often do you feel not qualified for a job?  How often do you tell yourself you’re not good enough of a parent?  Replace negative self-talk with positivity to build your reserves. Tell yourself that you’re the best parent you can be.  You are qualified for the job.  Push aside the negative voices and replace them with positive affirmations of who you are.  You will feel lighter and better about yourself.

Practice refueling:  Consider mental, physical, emotional and spiritual activities that make you feel good.  It can be as simple as sitting quietly for 15 minutes to change your perspective or breakthrough a mental roadblock you’re having.  Reading or exercising may help you recharge.  Find what works for you and give yourself the time to practice it.  Refuel your energy daily or as often as possible.  The energy you get out will be worth the investment.

Tips for success

  • Pick one or two of the above tactics and practice them every day.
  • Make small changes and build on them. Make the changes small so you feel the accomplishment and progress.
  • Pause occasionally to look around you and appreciate what you do have.
  • Spend time examining the values you hold. Have they changed?  If so, consider changing where you’re focusing your energy and time to reflect your current values.
  • Treat yourself kindly.

Changing your behavior to build energy reserves can be challenging.  However, you will feel the difference with each tiny step you take.  When you continue to build on each new habit, you’ll end up with more ways of energizing yourself that will benefit you to move through any change quicker and easier.  This is not to say that building your resilience will prevent you from life’s difficult challenges but having positive, healthy habits to draw on will better equip you to move through them.

Change Your Life and Relationships By Listening

Posted on by

Deep down, everyone wants to be heard, acknowledged, accepted and included. Do you know anyone who doesn’t have these universal desires? Being heard helps people, businesses, communities and our world.

When was the last time you felt really heard? Did it feel like you were connecting with someone, that the person cared for you and what you were saying, that they respected you?

Listening has taken a backseat
Listening can save a person’s life, solve a business’s issue and improve communities and the lives of people in them. Truly listening can bridge differences in our world. Listening can be hugely impactful. Yet, many people don’t listen. Why?

• Think we know what you’re going to say
• Don’t value others’ opinions
• Have physical hearing issues
• Are distracted with our own thoughts, worries, fears
• Don’t agree with your point of view
• Would rather talk
• Don’t think you’re interesting
• It’s not easy to do

Some of these may be valid reasons but it doesn’t account for the fact that distracted listening has become the norm in our society.

What is listening?
Listening is more than hearing someone talk. Deep listening is absorbing what the person is saying, watching their face and body language, looking for their heart’s message and connecting with what they are saying even if you don’t agree with a point of view. When was the last time you really, truly listened to someone, to their voice, their message, their heart, their body language? Listening deeply can give you more information than you would expect.

When I was working inside the corporate world, I benefited greatly by developing my listening skills. I watched the person speaking for their body language, I looked for their passion and I observed the reaction of others “listening.” Frequently, I picked up much more about what was going on by fully listening. I believe it was one of my strengths and helped me reach the level of success that was important to me. Good listening is a part of one’s emotional intelligence level.

What you can do right now to become a better listener

• Put away devices and other distractions.
• If your current situation isn’t conducive to actively listening, then plan another time to talk and listen openly.
• Concentrate on what the person is saying.
• Look into the other person’s eyes. It’s hard not to hear what someone is saying when you’re looking into their eyes.
• Don’t assume you know what the other person is going to say.
• Don’t think about what you’re going to say.
• Ask questions.
• Allow some space between the person finishing their thought and you commenting.
• Show engagement with excitement, empathy, agreement.
• Be open minded.

What do you get from listening?

• Personally, you get to know a person and their motives better.
• The speaker may have information that you can use now or in the future.
• You could be saving a life.
• Listening to an employee could help uncover a potential flaw.
• Listening to a customer could provide you with your next big product or a solution to a current one.
• Listening to your family builds understanding and strong connections that can’t be broken. (Most family rifts happen because one or another person doesn’t understand something that did or did not happen.)
• Listening to your own heart’s messages helps make better decisions.

Listening to someone is powerful. It saves families, lives, businesses, cities and countries. I challenge you to spend 15 minutes a day to listen more deeply and thoughtfully with your ears, eyes and heart.

Susan O’Connor is owner of Paradise Workplace Solutions and coaches clients to connect their personal values and passions to their business goals

5 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Employees’ Understanding of Change

Posted on by

Did you ever think that leading a business would involve so much talking and explaining? You talk with your managers, employees, customers, peers, vendors, the mailman, the cleaning crew and on it goes. It’s no wonder, then, when an employee says he/she doesn’t understand a change you want to make that you question if anyone has heard you.

Many important business decisions are well thought out and communicated with managers and employees. Yet, employees still don’t make the changes you need. This isn’t uncommon. How people adapt to change has been well studied in various situations from grief to business. There’s a process that people go through before they can truly act on implementing any change.1 Resistance is normal and should be expected when you begin to think about making a change. Still, how can you help employees through it?

Overcoming resistance to change
As a business owner, you spend a good deal of your time developing plans and finding solutions to problems. Your time is consumed by many different issues. Once you’ve solved one problem, another pops up to demand your attention. This is the point at which a change can begin to fail and you could be missing out on the most important factor in making your business successful—ensuring employees understand what you need from them. I’m not talking about knowing what the change is. I mean truly UNDERSTANDING and being a part of the company’s success.

Having spent most of my career in employee and leadership communications, I found that a company is always evolving to flourish. In stark contrast, many employees fear the very actions that will ensure the longevity of the company and their own future. Basically, they want their work experience to remain the same or want to make part of a change. How often have you heard team members say that they like the way the company was before more employees were hired or challenging market dynamics affected the business? Each employee has his/her own preference and degree of comfort with change.

Change is inevitable
Change IS happening more rapidly and businesses need to adapt or suffer. So, if companies are changing regularly and rapidly, shouldn’t we expect that employees would “get used to change”, adjust quicker and get on with the work that needs to get done? The number of experiences employees have with change doesn’t help them adjust. It’s the quality of how they have been included and understand the change that helps them adapt more quickly to what you need from them.2 Employees’ needs around the change must be met in order for them to be able to focus and get the job done.

As the owner of your business, you’re continually looking for ways to make improvements, increase your profits, become leaner, satisfy your workers and customers and reduce costs. You can’t do all that without occasional disruption. The question becomes how to continually improve your business while keeping your employees productive and satisfied working for you. The answer is to involve them in your business issues and improvements.

How to involve your employees

  1. Have conversations about your current business plans with your employees. Let them ask questions, probe your thoughts and rationale.  Include the naysayers.  Make sure your managers can articulate your plan and have conversations with their employees.  Do this as often as it feels comfortable.  Rotate the employees you’re having conversations with to get different perspectives.
  2. Set up environments that allow open, unstructured dialogue to occur. Coffee or lunch sessions with you or their manager.  Let employees know that they can ask you anything and you will answer to the best of your knowledge.  Most importantly, listen with no expectation other than to hear what they say.  Afterwards, take what you’ve gathered and think on it. Incorporate what you can and keep other ideas socked away until you see a pattern of similar issues or ideas.  Then act on those improvements.
  3. Ask your employees regularly how business or their work can be improved and what can be done differently. Employees are the experts on your business and know what your business needs.  Talk to employees who directly interact with customers.  What are your customers asking for that the business isn’t providing?  This is where your next new business development idea may originate.
  4. Write down what employees say and who made the recommendations. Follow up with one-on-one conversations or get a group of people with similar ideas together to discuss.  Engage them in coming up with ideas or changes.  Then have them help explain the change to others.
  5. Recognize employees for contributing. Give them credit when possible.  Use stories that include them when talking about new business ideas or changes that will make the business run better and more efficiently.

Here’s what you can do today

  • Talk to your leadership team about involving employees at all levels in discussions on business direction and improvements.
  • Set up a lunch meeting with 5 or 6 trusted employees to discuss how you want to get more worker input. Then set up another lunch meeting with 5 or 6 naysayers.  Ask them if your approach will work in your company’s culture.  Ask what would concern other employees about contributing more and owning the changes that will result.  Then begin implementing consistent, timely discussions with your workforce.

If you haven’t involved employees in solutions and business development previously explain what you’re doing and why, what you expect from workers and how you’d like this new approach to be part of your culture. The larger your business becomes, the more insights you will need from employees. It’s never too late to start including your employees in growing your business.

1 Managing resistance to change, www.prosci.com, August 5, 2019.
2 Joseph B. Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman, Alice de Chalendar, Your Workforce is More Adaptable than you think, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2019, issue, p. 118-126.

Look for our upcoming blog on:
Enhancing your employees’ skills through training and development