Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. We are on episode 43 today. Hey there, Brian.

Brian
Hey, Ani.

Ani
I had a really good time last time talking about, about the point of somatic coaching and change. Change professionals. And I would love to talk more about change, and I was hoping we might be able to do that today.

Brian
Well, let’s go ahead and change it up.

Ani
No, I want to keep it the same.

Brian
All right, so today we’re going to talk about the one mistake. I mean, there’s probably a few, couple, few, couple, a few mistakes that leaders could make when initiating change initiatives. From our perspective, there’s kind of like the one mistake you definitely don’t want to make if you’re a leader and you are, have in mind a change initiative. And let’s just say, like, change is happening all of the time. Different kinds of change can happen, whether there are what we call reactive changes or proactive changes, which we’ll talk about a little bit. But there’s really one mistake as a leader, I think that people make that basically makes it really difficult or almost impossible to help a change initiative come to fulfillment.

Ani
But change initiatives often don’t happen. You know, change initiatives are something that are actually, like, proactive. Usually they might be spurred by something else, but. Right, we’re trying and we’re initiating. There’s that word initiative. We’re initiating change. And I don’t have the statistics, I never do. But the research that I’ve been reading was reading some things on Gallup recently about how infrequently we can move the needle on change in organizations. And I think it’s like the bane of leaders existence to try to figure out what the magic sauce is to get change initiatives to move through.

Brian
And honestly, that’s partly because things are always changing. I mean, there was kind of like the pre-Covid world and then the COVID world and now kind of the post-Covid world. I mean, Covid still in the world, but the big, the pandemic, you know, shut down. So, like, things have just changed so much in how people approach work and how we think about work and the importance of it. And where is it happening? Is it happening in an office? Not in an office. It happening hybrid. Are we coming in? So there’s always these things that are happening in the environment that are creating how we go about doing business differently and challenging. So now what used to work in terms of change initiatives isn’t working anymore. Maybe, maybe sometimes it never worked, but it’s always a moving target.

Ani
Well, one of the things we like to talk about with organizations is it’s time to redefine words like work and, like productivity and stuff. It’s time to redefine those things. It’s a fantastic time to do that, but it’s important that we do, because as we’re looking at creating initiatives, we are no longer in the world that we were in five years ago, ten years ago, 20-30, whatever, years ago. And if we think that we can create initiatives based on not redefining those foundational terms, it’s going to fail. It’s not going to work, because we actually do, at this time in history, need to define those foundational words and terms, concepts that we can’t take for granted anymore. Yeah.

Brian
Yeah. So when. Let’s just talk about maybe, or whether it’s organizational change or personal change, change kind of happens in two basic ways to start with. It’s either reactive change or proactive change. In a lot of ways, reactive change gets initiated more quickly. What’s reactive change? Oh, my God. There’s a pandemic. What are we going to do about it? That’s reactive change. Oh, my God. The stock market just crashed. What are we going to do about it? There’s been a tornado. It’s been a hurricane. That’s all. That’s reactive change.

Ani
I think it’s interesting to look at how quickly some things did change with COVID and people were going, oh, my gosh. That change would have taken six years. It took six months. Wow. You know, there’s something to it, like you’re saying.

Brian
Yeah, there’s a lot of urgency with reactive change. And so here’s the thing with reactive change, that urgency comes along with a lot of energy to create the change. So in our personal lives, it’s kind of like, oh, my God, I’ve, um. I was in a car accident, right? I was in a car accident, but let’s say someone was in a car accident. I’ve got to change a whole bunch of stuff now. That’s reactive change. And we can oftentimes put a lot of energy behind that change. Or someone gets a diagnosis, a health diagnosis, that creates a lot of need for change. Um, maybe it’s, we have a child. Boy, that’s a lot of change all at once. Right? And it’s a reactive kind of situation. So reactive changes, stuff can change very quickly. There’s a lot of energy behind the change, at least initially. Now, oftentimes, the problem with reactive change is that initial energy explosion.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Just really can go off a cliff. And certainly, yeah, in healthcare, around the pandemic, that’s absolutely what we saw. Um, some of the statistics when Covid first came was that worker engagement went from paltry, something like, you know, 40% all the way up to, like 70% to 80% engagement of healthcare workers. Everyone’s on board, we’re all rolling in the same direction. Like, everyone’s on the same team, like, let’s get this done. And then it just kept going and going and going and going. And then a year, two years, three years later, a massive burnout cliff happened, just because that level of energy is just not sustainable. And after we kind of got out of the- out of the woods, out of the really dangerous woods, there was no more reactive change initiating or pushing that along. So that whole urgency bit went away, and the people’s energy levels just fall off a cliff and created a lot of health issues for the people in healthcare that were mental and physical health issues for people that were supporting people that were sick.

Ani
And the urgency is really related to survival. And so we’re not really using our full capacities for creativity, because we’re trying to make sure that we survive. That urgency is around survival energy. And yes, it can lead to burnout and all those things, because it’s not. The creative energy would be more of like this rejuvenating kind of energy that we would love to see. So I’m saying that too, because sometimes we think, oh, well, well, we should be in a place where we can either have or treat things like reactive change more often than. So we can stimulate that energy to get people going. I’ve seen that happen. And that is dangerous.

Brian
Yeah, that’s dangerous. Yeah. Because then we have this moving away from energy, actually probably a whole other podcast issue around the motivation pyramid, which we’re not going to talk about today, but the different ways that our subconscious functions around motivation. I’ll put that. Make a note. We’ll talk about that at some other time. But you’re 100% right, Ani, like artificially trying to use reactive change can really backfire.

Ani
Absolutely.

Brian
So then that brings us to proactive change. Okay, so proactive change is where most of us think about with change initiatives.

Ani
Yeah and it sounds good. Sounds great. There’s often no energy behind it.

Brian
You know, and I work with leaders and leadership positions that are actively trying to help their organizations change. And it’s really a fascinating experiment experience. Because every individual has a different threshold for proactive change. Now, I have to admit, like me personally, I’m pretty good at proactive change now, but I believe that’s because of (me). Well, it’s because of you, absolutely. But it’s also because I’ve been hit with enough two-by-fours in my past because I waited too long to change something I never want to have that experience again. So most people like, they just wait too long to change something. Think about way back in college, right? Like you take your exams and you bomb them and you’re like, well, I guess I should have studied after I got like a 1.0 GPA for this semester. And like, no, not me.

Ani
Okay.

Brian
But you can imagine like, you know, people, and now my scholarship is threatened and all that kind of stuff. I should have done something. And then you change as you go along. But most people, two by fours, two by fours, you get hit with enough of them and you’re like, listen, I don’t want that to happen again. I’m going to plan farther and farther ahead.

Ani
But it’s like health challenges. Yeah, health challenges are often the two by four that I needed to change my diet or to get more regular with my exercise or whatever it is. Or even recently, working with some couples who are partners. Partner couples, yeah. I mean, in business and life. Sorry, that was not clear. And the threshold for change oftentimes brings up a lot of conflict because we’re changing subconscious minds and stuff. And it can just be so challenging to have the energy to move through those things with all the increased conflict anyway.

Brian
So a lot of people wait.

Ani
Stuff that they weren’t addressing, weren’t addressing.

Brian
And that’s why we’re not starting it. Maybe on some level, we know subconsciously is going to bring up a lot of stuff.

Ani
It’s really interesting as we’re talking about change initiatives because that happens is the things that we weren’t addressing when we initiate change do come up to be addressed. And in order to really move forward in a way that is sustainable and is on a new level of vibrational frequency and actually does create actual change, we do need to address the things that are coming up.

Brian
Yeah. So certainly in change initiatives, if you have teams that are pretty change-friendly, which is actually one of the cool things we measure with the motivational mapping profiles. When we do motivational maps with organizations, individuals and teams, we can identify which teams are going to be more change-friendly than other teams are to help move. Just people are. Sometimes they’re like, hey, I can see there’s a problem coming way down the road. We better do something about it now. And there’s other people who are like, we’re not going to change it until there’s a massive catastrophe. So you think about things like climate change now, whether you agree on or don’t agree on why climate change is happening, whether it’s man-made or not man-made, I think we can all agree that climate change is real and it’s causing some catastrophic damages globally. And we still, as a country, as a global organization, are like, like still stymied about what to do about it. And we’re just not putting those. Even the science has been around for a long time, and now the science is at the point where like, listen, people, it’s almost too late at this point.

Brian
We’re going to meet these thresholds of warming and we’re going to keep having these massive problems. And why didn’t we do something about this 20 years ago with that long vision? It’s because humans again, resist change. Two-by-fours, we need a two x four, and maybe we need some more hurricanes, more two-by-fours. Healthcare is the same thing. I work with a nonprofit with our northern friends in Canada, and one of the initiatives we work with is helping to rehumanize healthcare and different healthcare systems in Canada than in the US. But when you meet with doctors and surgeons and caseworkers that work in Canada, the problems are very much the same around the healthcare has been numberized, we’re numbers, and it’s all about economics, really. There’s not a lot of human-centric stuff that happens in healthcare. I can kind of just keep going on about that. But we’ve known this for a long time. The pandemic just revealed all of that stuff. And still we’re not changing it. It’s still not changing. We’re still not doing something about it. So you can see when you have individuals oftentimes can move through these change process is a little bit faster.

Brian
But once you start having collective organizations now, you have to realize there’s individuals that are both change-friendly and have less change-friendly kind of approaches within that group, which can really slow down and stymie proactive change initiatives.

Ani
Yeah. So what’s the one mistake leaders make, Brian?

Brian
Well, so let’s kind of look at, when we look at change initiatives, like, what makes a successful change initiative? There’s books about this and there’s podcasts on this and there’s articles about this and all these sorts of things. I think if you, if we break it down to kind of two basic things, just to make it really simple and take it from there, a lot of the Gartner research has kind of broke it down to kind of two things. Number one, are we, are we prioritizing change? Like, what, in an organizational setting would change initiatives? What changes are the most important ones to make first?

Ani
Oh, okay.

Brian
That makes sense.

Ani
Well, yeah, right.

Brian
It makes sense to do that.

Ani
I think that oftentimes doesn’t get prioritized. Really awesome, though. I mean, when we work with organizations, people think that the change they need to make first is this one. And we very clearly see if they look a little deeper, if they make a different kind of change first, then whole number of things change based on that kind of core change. Oftentimes, organizations are not looking at the core change. They’re looking at superficial issues that are still going to keep having problems with.

Brian
Sure. Seem like that would just be quick hitters or easy to do.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Now, the interesting thing about this step one of prioritizing change, and by the way, this, I don’t think the top mistake is not prioritizing change, by the way, prioritizing which changes should be done. But I also want to point out. But the whole act of prioritizing change is a very frontal lobe dominant activity.

Ani
Yeah, yeah.

Brian
It’s a very thinking brain activity, very frontal lobe, high cortical centers, what we call executive functioning, to kind of put all the changes on the table and go, okay, what ones need to happen kind of first and putting them all in there, all in their place sort of thing. So if that doesn’t happen, I think that that’s a problem. But I don’t think it’s the number one mistake. I think that the number one mistake that people, leaders make is they don’t address how much energy it’s going to take to do the change.

Ani
Well, totally. Yeah, absolutely. Change does require energy, requires energy.

Brian
So much energy.

Ani
Requires so much energy. One of the examples I use with clients and leaders is that because we’re changing, I mean, the subconscious is like trying to turn a cruise ship around with, like, a paddle sometimes, and, like, it requires a tremendous amount of energy to move that cruise ship in a different direction. Yeah, that’s a big deal. And then what happens is folks don’t have enough energy for the change, and we start blaming them or blaming us. There’s got to be some answer. And then we start trying to figure out or blame, like, it’s the people, it’s the system, like, whatever it is, but it really comes down to energy.

Brian
Comes down to energy. And again, we’re here we are at the Somatic Coaching Academy, and so maybe our purview on why we think this is the most important mistake that people make is because we’re looking at this from a metabolic perspective and a neurological perspective, too.

Ani
So we actually expect a very, very high percentage of success for change, because that’s what we’ve seen and that’s our expectation. Whereas it’s been my experience that with individuals and with organizations, a lot of people actually expect pretty- I would say I would be comparing poor results. Like, they don’t actually expect 100% or they don’t expect 90%. They don’t expect success. So the expectations are actually pretty low a lot of the time, which actually accounts for the fact that nobody factored in the fact that it’s going to take a lot of energy rather than addressing the energy, and then you can actually have higher expectations for success.

Brian
Correct. Let’s just look at how. Let’s look at the brain for a moment. I don’t care what you’re doing as an individual. If you want to try to change something or learn to do something new, brush your teeth with your nondominant hand. Something as simple as that, that is going to feel clunky and weird, and your arm will get tired and you won’t get all the teeth. And then after a while, it’ll be easier. You’ll get all your teeth. And while you’re doing that, your brain is wiring new connections. While you’re doing that, while and after you’re doing that, brushing, literally creating new pathways. I think about it like you were, um, if I wanted to go from point A to point B and to get across, and let’s say there was a jungle between point A and point B, but there was, like, one little path that I could take. Most people will just take the path that already exists between point A and point B in the jungle. Now, learning to brush your teeth through their nondominant hand or a change initiative is like using a machete to hack through the same jungle.

Brian
Even when there’s a pathway that already exists just a few hundred yards away. That’s the kind of energy it takes to create because you’re creating a new pathway in your brain.

Ani
I’m laughing because we live in the Adirondack Mountains in New York, and one of my least favorite activities is called bushwhacking. Bushwhacking is when you just decide to go walk up a mountain, but there is no path. And it’s terrible because my legs get all scraped up and I’m going to get poison ivy and, like, it sucks. But that’s bushwhacking.

Brian
That’s a change initiative, though. That is what it’s like to do a change initiative, going to carve out a path on this mountain.

Ani
You know what else it reminds me of is how much energy we have. Teenagers and our youngest is learning how to drive right now. And it’s. It’s interesting to me how exhausting it is. Yes, both. Touche. Yeah, he gets tired. Like, we just went on a road trip, and I didn’t expect him to be able to do a three-hour trip. And why didn’t I? Because I knew he wouldn’t have the energy for it. But I was hoping that he maybe will do like an hour or something. And half an hour in, he was saying, I’m tired, and I get it because it’s so much energy to pay attention to all of this stuff because it’s new. Whereas for me, I can do the three hour trip because I’ve got all those pathways already carved out.

Brian
They’re already carved out.

Ani
I’m not bushwhacking how to drive a car.

Brian
And so when we’re initiating change in an organization, so this goes back to why it is important to prioritize change, because doing more than one change initiative at a time is really exhausting. It’s almost like learning how to brush your teeth with your left hand while you’re riding a unicycle and juggling at the same time.

Ani
Right.

Brian
It’s just, it’s just there’s so much stuff your nervous system to try to pull together, and you’ve got multiple people associated with it also, which creates inner resistance within itself. So, so the question when we talk about if this is the biggest mistake that leaders are potentially making, as “Are you really addressing, are you really, um, consciously and realistically addressing how much energy it will take to make the change?” And in my estimation, most people underestimate drastically. Drastically how much energy it takes to make the change.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So the question is, what are you taking off the person’s plate? The person’s or people’s plate who is driving or a part of the change initiative? Most organizational leaders putting more on, they just put more on, right? They’re like, oh yeah, and by the way, like, now there’s the whole new thing on top of all of the stuff that you’re already doing that is doomed to failure. You have to be very, very conscious about what are you taking off the person’s plate, not only because of a time-width, bandwidth perspective but just a nervous system bandwidth perspective. They are learning to do something different. They are engaging other people, and doing something different requires more energy. It just all around is going to take more energy. So you have to decide, number one, what are you taking off the person’s plate? The other thing I would consider is, what are you doing? You mentioned this a little earlier in the podcast. What are you doing to help proactively renew the person’s energy?

Ani
Yeah, I was going to say that. So when we go and work with organizations or making change initiatives, one of the things we do is we help people to develop simple, easy, somatic practice routines so that they can renew their energy. And we find without a doubt that it’s the people who aren’t doing those things regularly that don’t have the sustainable energy to move forward. But the people who do do those things regularly are like, wow, I feel so great. And they have the energy to be able to move forward.

Brian
And there’s certain things that we do that will drive energy renewal faster than other things, like Ani kind of mentioned, we call them core centering bites. So what little core centering things can have people do during the day to increase their energy? What kind of social engagements can you create for people to renew their energy? Again, depending on how the change initiative works, sometimes if it’s like create, if it’s a lot of people working together in the change initiative, then it might be, well, do people have enough alone time to take a walk or something by themselves with no, like, turn off the phone, there’s no messages, anything like that in order to renew their energy. So you have to be a little bit mindful about maybe is the, does the person tend to recharge better around people or not around people, those sorts of things.

Ani
And we’re all social beings. I’m super introverted. And even during change initiatives, yeah, I need that time to renew on my own. But I also need, like you were saying that social renewal with the people who are changing with me?

Brian
Yeah, yeah.

Ani
That’s super important.

Brian
Can I give you just a little funny inside tip on my little renewal thing that I do?

Ani
Sure.

Brian
So when we’re kind of like changing a lot of things and putting things together, I’m starting to feel like, okay, like my brain has like wired enough for now. Like, for me, it’s like flipping on like just a quick half a Seinfeld episode or something just to laugh. So for me, laughing is a great way to reactivate my nervous system in a different way to help me integrate that information.

Ani
Renewal.

Brian
But I also get it from the desk. I’ll go out, walk around in the woods a little bit and come back. But we know that those integrative renewal periods actually drive the change faster and more sustainably, too. So. So what are you doing proactively along those lines? That’s really important. Really, really important to consider.

Ani
You know, our, our daughter’s in college and she’s studying global management and she was recently the CEO of her company in a management class. And I don’t know if I told you this or not, but her head of HR scheduled out throughout the semester three comedy movie nights at company. And as I was talking with, with Charlotte about it, it was really fun to see how he just did it because he’s kind of a fun loving guy and he thought it was a good way to get the company together and stuff. But I thought it was so genius to be able to renew together, having that social engagement together. And she was commenting that after those movie nights, the company, their company was so much more engaged and charged up and ready to go. And the amount of energy that these kids needed to take to be able to get their company to the finish line, not just on their project, but it was a class. So they were learning about management and how to do all of the different positions and everything, and trying to actually create something as a company, like it required a tremendous amount of energy.

Ani
I thought that head of HR, I don’t, it didn’t sound like he kind of knew why.

Brian
It was a very organic thing to do.

Ani
Really smart.

Brian
So, okay, so we’re giving you some ideas as a leader, like how you can kind of really think about this. So be a little more realistic about how much energy it’s going to take. It’s going to take more than what you think it’s going to take almost always. What are you doing proactively around creating renewal moments for your teams and your employees and your people during that change initiative? There’s one more little note or little kind of suggestion that probably won’t be new for a lot of people. But how involved, how involved are all of the stakeholders with the initiative? Like, are their voices heard and important? Are the people who are a part of the initiative, do they know that their voices matter? Now, we don’t always have to take into everyone’s account, everyone’s, or implement everyone’s opinion, because that’s not different. But the thing is, if people know that they have a voice in it and they know that the change that they’re doing is meaningful for not just for the company, but for themselves also, that is also a way to conserve energy. Meaning. Right. Gotta conserve energy. Because if people like uncertainty, just like… Uncertainty, it’s a great thing, by the way.

Brian
I think we really have to learn how to adopt more and engage more uncertainty, for sure, especially around creating change initiatives and those sorts of things. However, if you are the leader with uncertainty, you still have a vision and you have a skin in the game around where you’re going. If your team doesn’t understand or don’t have a part of that vision, then the uncertainty feels like just walking around in the dark, like there’s no reference points, like, why are we doing this? I don’t understand. I don’t understand the context. And that just burns a tremendous amount of energy. So while you’re trying to renew someone’s energy, if you’re spending it even faster because there’s too much uncertainty, a person does not feel valued in the engagement. They don’t feel like they’re really a part of it. Like, those are great ways to start plugging some of those energy leaks for employees as well. So to have more of a kind of a, more of a holistic engagement around change rather than top down, we know that. Again, this is more Gartner research, that top down change models while still, like over. I don’t remember the number exactly.

Brian
For some reason, the number, 58% is in my head. This may not be accurate at all, but still a large number of organizations are still using top down change models. And the amount of change fatigue that’s happening in the workplace is rising correlatively. And so a big kind of understanding and push now is that it’s so, so important to have everyone who’s a part of the change experience, to have a voice in that experience and understand the context of it. So as a leader, spending more time doing that, not just, “Hey, this is what I’m telling you to do, just do it” like you might feel like that’s the most efficient way to do it. But that’s going to end up on the backend, causing big, big problems and possibly change fatigue and change resistance, ending up in the change initiative failing. Kind of how we started our conversation today.

Ani
I was smiling to myself thinking about how you were saying top down, meaning like leader down. But it’s funny because we’re at the Somatic Coaching Academy talking about looking at doing things from the bottom up and doing things in your organization from the bottom up are important, too. Change is possible. Change is possible. The creative, awesome, amazing changes that you envision for your organizations, for your teams are possible. And holding those expectations and also celebrating the milestones and knowing the things are possible is really important to having the faith that the changes are possible and that your people are the right people and that you’re the right person to help to carry that mission forward, helps you to put faith in front of fear, which both require us to believe in something invisible. So you might as well believe in the invisible faith over the fear that can really consume change initiatives. So, you know, we believe in you. We have faith in you. You can do it. Yeah. All right, thanks. This really fun conversation. Brian and I love talking about how people who are looking at not only helping themselves change, but creating change for those that they serve.

Ani
It’s really exciting to me to see the possibility for ripples upon ripples upon ripples in the world.

Brian
Thanks so much for joining us here today and let us know what you think and we look forward to seeing you on our podcast again next week.

Ani
Bye bye.