Month: August 2020

I recently started offering a limited number of free introductory coaching calls to people who are interested in learning more about business coaching and what it might be like for us to work together.

 

Many of these folks are successful business owners who want to grow their companies but feel like they can barely keep up with the volume and complexity of work they have right now.

 

Others are professionals, like lawyers, who see their industry changing and want to figure out how to build a practice that will remain relevant for years to come.

 

But I also talk with new business owners, some of whom have lost their jobs amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and have had to make drastic shifts in their lives and in how they see their place in the world.

 

I recently had a call with a prospective client who was struggling to get her new accounting business off the ground. While we won’t end up working together long-term, our conversation brought me a deep feeling of connection.

 

Some of her challenges were unique to her situation and her practice. But a lot of what we discussed was fear — something I’m familiar with.

 

Fear that she wasn’t good enough.

 

Fear that she couldn’t do it.

 

Fear that she was foolish for trying to follow her own course.

 

One way she experienced fear was as a voice in her head. She likened the fear voice to an “ex who doesn’t want you to feel good enough on your own.”

 

“But I know I can do it,” she told me. “I know that if I can push through my fear, I can start my business and be successful.”

 

I paused. Her comment really hit me.

 

I took a moment to connect with my own fear, and I realized how present it is for me.

 

I also realized that I’ve learned that I don’t need to push through my fear, as she suggested. I don’t need to force it away.

 

I’m still able to move forward — not because I’ve gotten rid of my fear, but because I’ve made friends with it.

 

Here is a sampling of my fears:

 

I’m afraid that I won’t make enough money and that I won’t be able to balance my roles as a leader, a father, a romantic partner.

 

I’m afraid that I won’t be as effective with clients as I want to be, that I won’t be useful, and that I won’t be asked back to do more work.

 

I’m afraid that I won’t have an impact on the world, that my ideas won’t help make things better.

 

Ironically, I’m also afraid that I’ll stand out and that not fitting in will lead to rejection.

 

Your fears are probably different from mine; our fears are our own. But I suspect that there is something nearly universal about fear itself.

 

Fear is uncomfortable and hard to sit with. Our instincts are to stay safe by moving away from it.

 

And therein lies the rub: even when we ignore fear, it’s still there. All we’ve done is put it in the driver’s seat.

 

Fear is crafty; it can alter our behavior, making us change our plans or lower our ambitions without us even noticing that we’ve limited ourselves. It can make us shy away from risks and avoid activities — like business development or *gasp* writing — that we know will help us widen our reach.

 

After my book Meltdown was published, I was reluctant to write things on a regular basis (such as, say, this newsletter!). I did write op-eds and think pieces, but I wasn’t writing about what, deep down, I knew I wanted to write about.

 

I was trapped in a fear loop. On the one hand, I was afraid of the judgmental part of me that decried “imperfect” work. On the other hand, I was afraid that I was becoming irrelevant; not writing gave ammunition to that judgmental part.

 

I was stuck.

 

But no more.

 

Often the things we fear are precisely the things that we need to do to move toward. I was afraid of writing. That’s because it was exactly what I needed to be doing, exactly how I needed to be engaging with the world.

 

Or take the example of my fabulous newsletter editor. She recently told me that she’s procrastinated for years on setting up her website. She’s afraid — of getting it wrong, of having to learn new technology, of being out there. But she also realized that her fear is a guidepost to how she wants to move forward — and it’s now part of her objectives this quarter.

 

And this is what I invited my client to see: it’s not about overcoming fear or using willpower to make ourselves do something that we don’t want to do. It’s about listening to and respecting our fear, knowing that it wants to keep us safe… when what we really need to do to grow is take a risk.

 

Whether it’s searching for a job that will meet a deep need that we have, starting a business, or working with a therapist or coach to walk the path of growth and discovery, you don’t have to overcome your fear, you just can’t run from it.

 

The good news is that sitting with fear is a skill, one that you can develop by yourself, with your colleagues, with a friend or romantic partner, or with the help of someone like a therapist or a coach. Developing the ability to sit with fear can dramatically alter your trajectory in life — I have seen firsthand how it opens up areas of prosperity, success, and health, and how it deepens relationships beyond what I’d ever imagined.

 

What about you? Are you ready to sit with your fear?

 

*Click here to learn more about booking a free coaching session.

Practical tips to avoid change management screw ups

 

We’ve all been part of boneheaded changes in our work. Somebody gets an idea about how things could be better, and, all of a sudden, we’re using a new piece of software, emailing weekly status updates to our manager, or wasting time filling out those dreaded TPS reports.

 

Many of these changes are dumb. Full stop.

 

That’s because, in most cases, the ideas come from people who don’t really understand the problem. Managers reach for control to tame uncertainty (even though that’s actually what they need to embrace).

 

Even people who understand the problem may not get the solution right. They come up with something that works but only in a specific context.

 

As a result, people resist the changes.

 

People resist good changes, too. It’s only natural. Humans value autonomy and security and being told to change threatens both of those things.

 

Right now, I’m working on two big projects — one with a group changing how Microsoft consumes and delivers all things legal, one with another Fortune 10 firm — where I help leaders use curiosity to accelerate transformational change. We spend a lot of time talking about resistance, about the importance of getting everyone to understand the “why” of a change, and about the details — from who needs to be involved to how we plan meetings with stakeholders. (Quick tip for meetings: try to limit any presentation about change to five slides and, instead of presenting data, ask people how they’re feeling).

 

One of the models I use when I consult with companies is the cycle of change, developed by Rick Maurer. We use the tool to understand where different stakeholders and individuals are on the change journey. And it all starts with seeing the need for a change.

 

Credit: Rick Maurer

 

I find it delightfully ironic that I was recently in the process of flubbing a change inside my own firm.

 

I made all the classic mistakes that leaders make. I assumed that it was a small change. I assumed that the reasons for it were obvious. I assumed, basically, that people wouldn’t care about it.

 

For context: I want to change how we track the hours that people spend on different projects, so that I can better steward the company’s resources and understand the return on investment we receive from different projects, such as the mailing list, the (teaser alert) podcast we’re launching in a month, the marketing for my one-on-one coaching work, and the consulting work.

 

To me, it seemed like a very straightforward change.

 

It was my executive assistant who clued me in to the fact that I was missing something. She was concerned that the way we paid people would change under the new system. To me, that seemed like an unrelated matter — but it made me realize that I was pushing forward on a change without understanding the concerns of the people who will be affected by it.

 

So, I changed course by doing a few simple things:

 

1. I raised my awareness. I realized that while I was ready to roll out the change, I hadn’t spent time sharing the why. I had no idea whether my team even knew that there was a problem to solve.

 

2. I communicated. (To go meta for a second, this post is actually part of that communication. Some of the team will help get it out the door, and I’ll send it to everyone after it’s finished.)

 

3. I made a short video talking about the reason I saw a need for the change. In the video, I asked the team to think about what was working with the setup that we have now so that we make sure that any solution meets their needs, too. (The video is very “inside the sausage factory,” but I’m sharing it in case it’s useful.)

 

4. I set aside time for us to talk about it as a group. These things only took a few minutes and they are super simple. But that doesn’t mean that they are easy. Far too often, even thoughtful and well-intentioned managers (like me!) charge ahead without understanding the ripple effects of change.

 

For my part, my hope is that sharing my reasoning and opening up the conversation will help my team and me create an effective solution that works for them — and meets my needs to understand how we’re using resources. A small shift like this can make all the difference.

 

Are you working with any colleagues on change? If so, share this article with them because they might find it helpful!

 

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If you want a different outcome, you have to do things differently.

 

What’s that mean?

 

Here’s how I put it in a recent article about innovation:

As someone seeking change, you’ll be asking people to do things differently. It can be helpful to remember that you’re embedded in the organization: if you approach the work in a way that feels comfortable, you’ll get the same results. So invite yourself to try new things and to take risks. Not only will this yield different outcomes, but you’ll also model the very experimentation you’re trying to facilitate.

 

On a recent podcast, my new friend and flight safety expert Adam Johns made this point very well (21:08). As part of shifting the safety culture at Cathay Pacific Airways, Adam intentionally made an effort to change the conversation happening around him.

 

He included short, bite-sized articles in safety committee meeting agendas and invited participants to reflect on how these topics applied to Cathay’s operations.

 

Adam found that leaders, after engaging with a new term from an article, would apply it fairly quickly. It would change their thinking.

 

In the context of safety, for example, managers would talk about and then, more importantly, start to internalize the difference between work as imagined (how a planner thinks a job is done) vs. work as done (what a person on the line actually does).

 

I’ve seen this in my work, too. Introducing the Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off helps managers appreciate that everything is a trade-off. That awareness helps managers own those trade-offs—balancing the pressure to execute quickly against the desire to have every job done in as thorough a manner as possible—rather than pushing them down in the organization.

 

In some sense, my book Meltdown is all about understanding the difference between complicated systems and complex ones (read a sample here!). That sounds like a simple difference in language, but it’s not. Separating the two things can help us make sense of the world in a deep way.

 

Complicated systems have a lot of parts—but their behavior can be quite predictable.

 

In complex systems, on the other hand, it’s the interactions that matter, rather than the number of parts. As a result, complexity produces unexpected results.

 

Beyond Meltdown, just think about the late Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation or Amy Edmondson’s idea of psychological safety. Words create a schema in our brains; those schemas literally change the way we see the world.

 

And it’s not just systems: as a coach, I use curiosity to help my clients change their internal language. I’ve personally seen those changes unlock tremendous value for my clients, all because of a small shift. What looks like a failure from one perspective can turn out to be a success from another, but we only get there when we start to probe the language that we use in our stories.

 

As a writer, I’m biased, but I think language matters a lot. It changes the way we think, and it changes our awareness of possibilities.

 

What about you? How have you used language to change the conversation?

 

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