On Change

The aim of this article is to help you effectively manage unexpected change at work. It includes coaching insights and tools to help you use change to create fresh opportunities for positive results. If you need support with a current change, or you’d like to find out more about how Executive Coaching with Vicky Green could help support your career success, please contact me on LinkedIn.

Once bitten twice shying away from change

ashamed, until I find

some milky tea humour

whodunnit curiosity

and a card or two up my long, bedraggled sleeve…

Your experience of change, and the way you deal with it, is unique to you. It is not the same as my experience of change, nor your colleague’s (even if you both find yourselves at the sharp end of the same restructuring), nor your well meaning friend’s.

The fact that your experience of change is unique to you is what serves to make change challenging, and feel so very personal. Despite its ubiquity, change can leave us feeling isolated and alone. We may find ourselves unable to share our talents or take the initiative in progressing our careers, just at the point when logically we know we should be building our networks and preparing for the future. If we’re not careful, we can get overtaken by overwhelm or even hit fight/flight/freeze, increasingly unhappy yet stuck staring at the headlights of oncoming events.

Handling change effectively then, becomes a core skill for those of us who want to achieve a long and meaningful career.

The good news is that, although each of us experiences change in our own unique way, there are some very helpful tools we can use to make our change journey run a little more smoothly.

Having assisted clients handle their own changes at work for over two decades, I’ve pulled together here a couple of key insights and exercises which I hope will support you in managing your own change to your very best advantage.

1. Time Travel

Each change we face resonates with our experiences of previous changes. Like tree trunks with their rings, positive years of plenty as well as those years we’d rather forget, will all have left an imprint on our personal timelines. These past events can create a ripple effect even if we have long forgotten them, impacting how we respond to change today. Particularly if we’ve experienced challenging changes in the past, we will want to reframe these memories so that we can positively deal with the actual matter in hand.

To quickly understand how previous events might be affecting you currently, try the following exercise in your journal.

Calendar Snap

This is just like the children’s game of Snap, where players shout Snap when two matching cards are revealed. Except with this game, you’ll be looking for matching dates, times and places, where the change you’re going through now shares a common vibe with a previous change event, to help uncover memories and reclaim your agency.

Example

You find out in June that your employer is looking to make redundancies. You search your memory banks for experiences of change in June and come up with - exams! You remember feeling hot, sweaty, uncomfortable and underprepared. You note this in your journal and write down all your impressions and recollections. Suddenly you remember the fear of waiting for results, unsure whether you’d ever get the qualifications you desperately needed. You can feel the fear in your body like it was yesterday. Exploring further you start to make connections with the current situation, where uncertainty over your future and feeling unprepared are again causing you anxiety. Recognising the common pattern you take a deep breath out. You are able to feel kindness towards your younger self who was able to handle those exams, the results, and progressed into the capable adult you are today. Your shoulders relax as you remember that you are fully competent at dealing with change. You make a note of some next steps you can take to boost your confidence and your wellbeing. You decide to get a cup of tea and spend 30 minutes refreshing your CV.

2. Making Space

Like the forest fires which allow Sequoia trees to seed, change can create much needed space in our careers for new opportunities to take root. This may occur when a particular door is closed, such as our role is terminated unexpectedly. Or it can be that we feel we have to take a choice which has an element of obligation, such as the need to leave our current role and relocate to accommodate a spouse’s career. Without much warning we may find ourselves with time on our hands, as well as a very real need to earn, to find our feet again, and to belong.

At these times it can be helpful to consider what new career option might be coming into your life. Even if you can’t see any signs of its arrival (yet) it can be great to do some creative thinking about what you’d enjoy in your next role. This will help you to pivot your approach with prospective employers and recruitment contacts. And you never know, the new role you imagine might be exactly what’s coming your way!

Career Columbo

This exercise takes its inspiration from the wonderful TV series Columbo, where Peter Falk’s charismatic detective has a habit of asking his famous question ‘And one last thing…’ just as he’s about to leave the suspect, catching them off guard and solving the case. In this exercise, you’ll be brainstorming the questions you want answered by your mystery next role, to help you uncover your career options. (For extra points you may want to do this exercise wearing a beige trench coat).

Example

You write in your journal ‘And one last thing…’ and then make a note of the following questions which your inner Columbo would like to have answers to:

• What skills will I want to use?

• Where will I want to work?

• Who will I want to work with?

• How much will I want to earn?

• What will I want to create?

• Why will I enjoy this role?

• Who will benefit from my work?

You then pick a question to start journalling on, letting your imagination take over as you think of all the possibilities. Once you feel complete on that question, you pick another and so on, until you start to get a strong feeling of what you most want. You decide to reach out to a headhunter to introduce yourself, with a new sense of optimism for the future.

I hope that you’ve found this article useful. Please do reach out if you have any feedback comments or questions. To your beautiful career!