Change – How to Survive Tip 3

Whatever age you are, you will have already experienced a lot of change. Even if it’s just leaving school to your first job, or going to college, or moving house, or getting a new sibling, you have experienced change. And the older you are the more changes.

Managing Change Tip

List ten changes that have happened in your life, over which you had little control. For example, you probably had to leave school at a certain age. Or your firm downsized. Or your industry became flooded with new technology (print, photography). Maybe your personal life went into freefall. But don’t only focus on negative change experiences, look for the positives too.

Now, consider your list. You have survived all those changes and are probably much better at dealing with change than you may think. What skills and qualities do you have that have helped you in the past, and will help you in the future?

It can be really helpful to do this exercise with a friend and share stories and ideas. And please do share any of your own tips!

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Change – How to Survive Tip 2

The first casualty of change is truth.

If you are in an organisation undergoing major change you will know that communication is vital. All organisations know this and every single book on managing change tells managers to communicate, communicate and communicate!

And in my experience, all organisations start off with good intentions but become lapsed communicators somewhere along the way.

The reasons are many. Maybe the person in charge of communications suddenly finds their own job at risk and goes to ground. Maybe the project is floundering and no one wants to say so openly. But more often it’s because for long periods of time there is no real change. And organisations make the huge mistake of saying nothing.

And we know what happens to a vacuum? Someone helpfully fills it.

Managing Change Tip

Always try to distinguish between you know what as fact, actual fact from a reliable source, and what is conjecture, rumour, speculation and gossip. If you hear something about the process try and check it out. Try not to get drawn into discussions of how awful everything will be because actually, that makes you feel awful! It’s fine to let off steam now and again but endless discussion of how bad it all is will really bring you down and limit your ability to cope.

Details of my change seminars can be found here.

Change – How to Survive Tip 1

Change is most definitely in the air at the moment. But actually there is rarely a time when change is not with us – thankfully, or we’d still be scratching our heads wondering if a wheel might be a good idea or not!

I work in a lot of organisations who are undergoing change and the initial response is nearly always the same. Employees feel threatened and anxious, sickness levels go up, productivity suffers. And the toll on individuals can be enormous.

That’s the downside. But don’t forget change can also be hugely positive! It’s hard to remember that when change is being imposed but you will probably have had as many positive experiences of change in your life as negative ones. It’s just that we remember the negative ones so much more clearly!

If you are experiencing a lot of uncertainty in your personal life, a change at work over which you have no control can be the final straw. The Holmes and Rahe stress scale is still a useful guide to thinking about the impact more change might have on you.

Managing Change Tip

My first tip is to take a look at it, see how you rate and then take steps to look after yourself. It might be that you join up with a friend to help and support each other, or make sure you are eating healthily and look after yourself physically. Or find out what is on offer in your organisation to help you – mentoring, counselling, even subsidised gym membership!

Resolve now not to be a victim of the changes but take some control where you can.

This is the first in a series on managing change. If you want to be certain of getting every post you can sign up for them simply by putting your email address in box at top of this page. And you can unsubscribe at any time.

You Can’t Do It All

I have just been out in my garden and, as is so often the case, it prompted a post. Hope you like it.

A few years back my garden was my pride and joy. When my children (and several other people’s kids!) had stopped using it as a playground, and the sand pit, swings, and slide became redundant, I began to reclaim it, bit by bit. For a while the lawn served double duty as a rugby pitch and my washing line prop is still a pole once used for vaulting, but once the offspring disappeared it became my own personal terrain. My pet project.

It was a labour of love (and source of huge expenditure) but the results were worth it. It was a joy to see the garden I had oft dreamed of emerge. It wasn’t Kew, and wouldn’t win any prizes, but it was mine and it gave me huge pleasure.

Letting Go

However, about two years ago we were finally granted planning permission to build a wee bungalow for my Mum on a plot of land opposite our house. This too had been a long held dream but the vagaries of Bath planning delayed it for year after year. We reapplied for a third time, having drawn up lots of different plans and permssion was granted. Suddenly (or so it seemed after the enforced delays) we were in the throes of building a house with builders, and the consequent disruption, despite having fabulous builders!

Temptation

We have lived in our family home for over 30 years and during that time I have had many a fantasy (not shared by my husband) about knocking down walls, replacing windows etc, but in the way of these things very few had become real. But now I had a team of lovely builders at my beck and call and the temptation was too much.

“How much would it be to knock down that wall? Really, that cheap if we let you do it when it’s raining and you can’t work on the house? Great, it’s a deal! Oh and we’ll now need a new floor, new…”

Many similar conversations followed and at one point I found myself ‘supervising’ the new build, a new kitchen installation in my mother’s old house, and major works in our own! And I had more training and coaching work than I could handle! Of course, my husband was a huge help but I had very clear ideas about how my Mum’s new house should be designed, and I’d been plotting the wall removal in ours for ever, so I was voluntarily at the helm. Ms ‘I can do it all’!

The Garden

And I still wanted my lovely garden. But the garden became a dumping ground for rubbish and ‘possibly useful one day’ items, like old sinks, bits of pipe, and tons of wood to be stored for our new wood burner (another addition to the Woods household!)

The trouble was I wasn’t always around to supervise where all this rubbish went and a lot of it ended up on in places it shouldn’t. My lovely garden was being destroyed. I’d come back from a day training and wail:

” But there’s a beautiful clematis on that trellis, don’t you remember? Oh no, all my white tulips are under a pile of wood! You can’t put a wood shed there it’ll block access to the pond”

In short, and in all honesty, I was a right old nag.

And one day it dawned on me.

To achieve the more pressing and immediate dream of building my Mum’s new house and gaining my lovely huge kitchen diner, I had to let the garden go. And so I did. I made a conscious decision not to worry any more about it. Not to go rushing about like a demented witch every time I came home and found something on top of something about to bloom, or right in front of the window so it looked like a world war two bomb site. And not to nag my poor husband ragged about it.

Relief

It was actually a huge relief. I hadn’t stopped loving my garden - I hadn’t given up on the dream, but I had relegated it for a wee while.

And that’s what we all need to do sometimes to survive, postpone things in order to achieve more immediate aims. It’s what sociolgists call ‘deferred gratification’.

Sometimes we have to let go of our sacred cows, our long held dreams to get where we need to be. If you feel like you can’t see the wood for the trees (in my case it was the literally the trees for the wood!), pause a while. What is the most important to be doing right now?

Love Yourself!

Do you? Love yourself that is? I don’t mean in the ‘I am wonderful, better than anyone else’ obnoxious kind of way, but do you value and respect yourself?

Sometimes events in our lives have caused us to feel unloveable and it’s hard to shake the negativity off. In fact, sometimes a good deal more than a metaphorical shake is required to rid ourselves of notions acquired by the experiences of life. (But hang onto the wisdom those same events have given you!) We are what we think. As we think so we act.

So, answer honestly, do you love yourself? Would you be friends with yourself? What are the loveable things about you? (There will be loads and if you’re having trouble answering that question take some time to think about it. If you’re still struggling consider asking for some outside help). Think differently about yourself and how you behave will be different.

Write down the reasons you are loveable and likeable.

This is not about achievements, although considering your achievements will help you determine some of your likeable and loveable qualities. It’s about your qualities: loyalty, kindness, honesty, humour, ethics, values, and so on.

When you love yourself it becomes easier to make positive changes in your life; you lose some of the fear around change. More importantly, you believe that you deserve some positive change! Powerful motivators for achieving your goals!

If you’ve found this post helpful, you, or a friend, may be interested in my next RenewYou course.