When things get bumpy, the natural human tendency is to hold on. This is a great strategy if you’re on a roller coaster ride, of course! But when you’re going through change at work or at home, it’s a tactic that can limit you, be costly and actually hamper your ability to adapt to change. There are unexpected strengths and solutions that can emerge from change, but you need to let go of the familiar first to discover them.
Over the course of the pandemic we all had first-hand experience of being on a roller coaster. Here are a few vignettes to help bring some of it back to you:
Parents: School is going to be online. How will I work and make sure the kids are doing their school work? No, we’re back in classrooms, phew! No wait, we’ll be remote for the rest of the week and then back in classrooms on Mondays.
Workers: I get distracted working from home. Hey, I think I’m a bit more productive working from home without the commute time to worry about. Hmm, now we have to go back to the office? But I don’t want to go back 5 days a week anymore.
Everyone: Masks on. Masks optional. Masks recommended, but not required. What’s next?
As we continue to emerge from the initial intensity of the pandemic, we are still coping with change on many levels.
It’s often cited that as many as 70% of change projects fail. Ensuring that people and processes shift in concert out of the status quo to the new preferred state is a process, not a one-time activity. It’s one thing to say you want to evolve from a traditional hierarchical, top-down style of leadership and management to a more collaborative, bottom-up style. Yet it can be hard to “walk the talk.” Whether it’s because there isn’t as much consensus around the big vision as they wanted, employees asking questions that weren’t expected or feel out of scope, or some new thorny issue emerges that leaders aren’t prepared to handle, it’s amazing how quickly those old structures and mindsets can get snapped back into place when an obstacle shows up.
One of my passions is musical theatre. I love seeing performances and find it incredibly impactful to see people fully out there, belting out their songs or salsa-stepping their way through some choreography. The truth is acting on stage was something I was drawn to for most of my life, but when it came to actually auditioning for – singing in public – I could never find the courage to put myself out there. After all, what would people think of me if I failed, up on a stage, in public, under the glare of a spotlight?
That inner dialogue got stale after many decades, and so 8 years ago, I decided to let go of clinging on to my comfort zone and joined a community musical theatre. It’s definitely been uncomfortable and like stepping into the unknown, yet it’s provided me with some of the greatest joy and belly laughs of my life! Most interestingly, it’s opened up some experiential truth and insights for me that I bring to my personal and professional life every day.
Here are a few tips I can offer to help you unlock the unexpected gifts of change:
1. Stay Curious
The first rehearsal of the season is a mix of excitement to be back with the cast, and anxiety about how we will all be able to pull together a show that sells out the house in 4 months time. When confronted with change, the tasky part of your mind can go on overdrive, wondering “How long will this take?” or “Is everyone going to pull their weight?”
People respond differently to feeling uncomfortable when facing change and uncertainty. Some draw inward and become silent, hoping that if they don’t engage actively in the change, maybe everything will just go away and back to how things used to be. Others focus outward, asking a zillion questions as they try to engineer potential outcomes before even the first step has been taken.
Stay curious and just sit with the whole range of emotional reactions you may be having. Sometimes it’s necessary to marinate meat before you cook it so that the seasonings have time to blend and tenderize the meat. Expect some discomfort and don’t be too quick to prejudge the situation. Ask what’s possible on the other side of this discomfort. Often our best scenes would emerge as we rehearsed several times, and learned how to react and improvise off one another. Many of the best laughs were something that were created by the synergy of our troupe working together, rather than following one single person’s “great idea” offered on Day 1 or directly following the script as written.
2. Change Your Perspective
We all get conditioned to operate within a prescribed comfort zone, which includes a set of norms about how we view things, how we interact with others and the beliefs that we hold, many of which we hold unconsciously. When confronting change, sometimes all you can see is the challenges and it can be hard to get beyond that.
Change your perspective. When I learned how to paint, I remember being freaked out when the instructor told us to turn the canvas upside down and to continue the painting from there. I was quite happy with how it was progressing, and to turn it upside down didn’t make much sense to me. Until I did it. Then I started to see new connections and ways I wanted to work with colours and shapes.
Our director often inspired us to mix things up – even just trying on a different physicality helped us to develop a more well-rounded sense of our characters, and how they related to each other. How can you change your perspective and stay open to what’s on the other side of change? Instead of asking “Why this?”, ask “What’s possible?”
3. Be Willing to Experiment and Iterate
Often the best way to figure something out is to just take one single step. Pick something and take action. See what works and build from there. Appreciate what didn’t work and let it go.
Although my theatre troupe had a total of about 18 rehearsals together, we experimented and tried new things each time. Even when we moved into the theatre for rehearsal and performance week, we knew we’d built a solid foundation to deliver a great performance. But we had to stay open to improvising and iterating right through to closing night. Things happen in live performances. Props don’t get into the scene in time. Someone is late for an entrance, or skips a line. One audience responds differently than another. We stayed aware, in tune with each other, and flexible to dance in the moment to create something new each time.
Change is always going to be coming at you. Being able to move into it rather than get locked down because of it is key to developing resilience, creativity and solutions to meet it effectively.
