02/12/2014
Change Your Approach To Change by Perri Altschul PCC
Why is change in the workplace and in our personal lives so difficult? Do you find yourself wondering why you set goals and then do exactly the opposite behavior? When someone has the skill, opportunity and motivation to change but continues to revert to their old behavior, how can we work more effectively with ourselves or with others?
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself these questions over and again? It’s not because you’re lazy, stubborn, or resistant to change. We each have a brilliant, but often hidden system of self-protection that undermines our goals and desires.
While our belief system is dynamic, rarely do we take the time to review it, let alone revise it.
When we want to change, we often apply the New Year’s resolution approach: We set a goal, we use willpower to move ourselves towards the goal. How effective is this approach in the long-run? In a 2007 study, 3000 people were tracked while attempting to achieve a range of resolutions including losing weight, visiting the gym, quitting smoking, and drinking less. At the start of the study, 52% of participants were confident of success. One year later, only 12% actually achieved their goal. Even in organizations, we often take the “New Year’s resolution” approach to setting goals for business and individual performance.
One reason our belief system cannot be overturned by simply learning new skills or powering through, is that we’d simply be adding new skills into a potentially limiting framework - like adding new apps to an outdated laptop that doesn’t have the computing power to run the apps.
Without understanding the root of what we’re avoiding, we are unlikely to address the real reason that change does not occur. The kind of change we need is adaptive. But all too often we apply technical solutions to adaptive problems. When we apply adaptive solutions to adaptive problems, we are finally able to create sustainable outcomes.
We need a new approach to CHANGE....
1. Learning to see our problems or challenges as "opportunities" is something we hear quite a bit in the workplace. My question is an opportunity to what end and how can we do the adaptive work that is necessary?
2. being "on our own" is often prized. This however leads to a lack of mirroring, honest feedback, and support. To create sustainable, adaptive change, we need to learn how to lean into support, how to hear feedback from multiple perspectives and make meaning of it, and how to create a self-supporting change structure in our lives.
3. Let's go back to the computer metaphor for a moment. Have you ever tried to load new apps onto an old system? Most likely the new apps wouldn't run because the operating system couldn't handle them. For adaptive change to occur, we need to change all three elements of our own operating system - our head, heart, and gut (or intuition).
4. Stepping outside of our comfort zone is a requirement for adaptive change to occur. We can do this gradually and thoughtfully by designing experiments that will test our assumptions, integrate the learnings, and then being choiceful about new pathways that open.
5. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth about ourselves and it can also a powerful interference with our ability to manifest change. As we learn to work with and calm our fear-driven limbic system, we gain more objectivity and perspective.
@ Physiocarekenya we believe "Time to change starts by changing our belief system/Upgrading our operating system" to match the revolving needs of life so to our career and co-curriculum goals.....
