Welcome to the New Manager Podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nicol. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, I want to invite you to come work with me. I'm taking new clients. We work together one-on-one. We get to focus on your career, your life, what's going on with you day-to-day so that we can get you a bit out of the weeds to see the bigger picture.
Find some options, reconnect you to your agency to what it is that you want. Find out where the obstacles and the blocks are and then create a plan to move past them. It's not just going to help you with your day-to-day work and your career goals, but it's also going to shift and transform the way that you're thinking about yourself and your life in a much bigger, more holistic way. So you can start. If you're curious about that, then book a consultation.
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for today. I want to leave you with something kind of short and sweet, but something I've been thinking about a lot. And it's this idea of managing change. And whether you are trying to create change in your own life or whether you are seeking to initiate change in your organization with your team.
If you're trying to change by, you know, managing up or if there's some kind of change happening in your organization and now it's your job to communicate that change to others on your team, this is going to be relevant to you. And for today, I want to simply leave you with a picture about why we resist change. So, number one, we tend to resist anything that requires effort.
This is not a problem. This is you know, like your your brain being really efficient and it takes energy to learn new things and to do new things. And your brain is like, if I don't have to why, why would I? You know, if this already works, why would I change? So #1, expect there to be some resistance anytime there's change on the horizon, even when
it is change you want. So if you set some intentions for this coming year about things that you have wanted to change about yourself, you might have found yourself in the position where you notice yourself avoiding or resisting or fighting the change, even though on one level you want it. Like you're choosing this change, but for some reason you're still just, you know, kind of fighting it.
So think of it this way, right? There are kind of three main things that you'll identify and you'll need to manage if you're going through change or wanting to facilitate it #1 the thought. But I don't know how that creates resistance. When people say but I don't know how they will resist and kind of stay stuck in the place that they are. #2 I don't know why. If people don't know why they should change or if you. I don't know why you should change.
And I mean on a deep level, not on a surface level. The surface level doesn't hold a lot of weight. But deep down, like where you feel it in your bones, that sense that oh, I know why I need to change. I know why this matters to me that will be more effective if we don't answer that question. I don't know why. Like why should I change? Why is this happening? Why are they initiating this change? Then we'll have more resistance. And third, this is the big one.
I don't want to. Sometimes we don't want to change and that's what's going to get in the way. And this one is interesting because it could be something that is a bit underneath the surface and not obvious, kind of like how, you know on the surface you might say, yeah, I want this new job. I want to progress. I want the income, I want the responsibility.
I'm ready for a new change. But then underneath all of that, where maybe you're not fully aware of it, you're actually afraid of that change because you're afraid, well, what if I don't do it well enough? You're afraid of, you know, failing. Or you're afraid that if you succeed beyond that of your community or your family or your friends, you might be afraid underneath that you'll lose those relationships with people that are important to you.
Or maybe underneath that potential success, there's a fear that you won't belong. Maybe your background is different than you know what you know of the background of the other folks who are at that level. And so we want to be able to to understand that whatever that surface level resistance is, the resistance of, I don't want to. We also want to investigate and get curious about what might be beneath that, what might be underneath that.
I think one of the things that can happen in the workplace when there is a change happening and there is resistance to it, I think we sometimes imagine that people just need more information or they need to, you know, they just need to change their attitude. You know, we're we're going in this direction and you just need to get on board with it. And when we take that approach, we end up making things harder for ourselves and for everybody else.
Because unless we're mindful of where the resistance is coming from and unless we start to get curious about it, it's like we'll always be trying to solve the wrong end of the problem. So instead, we want to start looking at what could be behind this resistance. And it might be multifaceted. They might be things that are all related. It could be that the fear of gosh, but I don't know how to do this. I don't know why I should.
And underneath it all, I just don't want to because I'm worried that you know, like some, some there will be something that happens that I'm just, I don't feel prepared for that I'm uncomfortable with. We want to be able to look at that and understand that. And now what I want to invite you to do, and this is honestly a lot of the work that I do with my clients, there's a change that they want and then we figure out what you know, what needs to, what needs to change
in order to have that change. So for example, if you're doing a job search, you know the change you want is you want a different job. The fear might be, I'm afraid that I'm not qualified. I'm afraid I don't have the right background. I'm afraid that I won't fit in. I'm afraid that if I apply, I'll get rejected and then I'll feel
bad. So then the change that needs to happen to facilitate that change is the willingness to take those actions and the willingness to love yourself and support yourself even through the discomfort of doing new things right. So when you are going through a change, you want first to start to understand this for yourself. This is also one of those things where when you're on the outside, it can feel so easy to say, oh, you know, I don't know
why my team just doesn't change. Like they have all the information. They should just get on board, but that doesn't actually help them. And so it's easy to remember that when we are looking at someone else's change, it can feel so simple.
But for ourselves, we can often miss the underlying obstacles and not fully realize what is it going on in our own mind, in our own heart and emotions and in the way that we're perceiving things that will either have us moving steadily towards the change we want or continuing to avoid resist. You know people say self sabotage, but I think it's not exactly a sabotage kind of thing.
It's more like there's a deeper logic and you are so loyal to that you can't even see it. But it's driving so many of your behaviors and choices. So you know, for the coming week, what I'd offer you to think about is noticing your own life. Where is there a change that you want to create for yourself and notice what type of resistance you have? Is it? I don't know. How is it? I don't know why I should, Is it? I just, I don't want to. That's always the fun one.
Because on one level you're like, no, I I do want this change. I I do want it. But when we sit with it, when we investigate, when we get curious, when we remove the judgment and start to look at the truth underneath, there's often this feeling, this little voice inside that says, but I don't want to.
And you know, it might be activating your inner you know, rebel like Rebel Kid. The inner you know, you can't tell me what to do. Like that internal resistance that's like you can't make me starts to activate. You want to be on to yourself and understand how that works so that you're working with yourself rather than against. It takes so much energy to be in that state of internal conflict and there's just there are better ways to do it, you know.
So that's what I love to help folks with. If that's something that you are also looking to understand, then we should definitely talk. If you are in a situation at work where you are trying to manage change or facilitate change, then that's also something that we can coach on so that you have a strategy that will be more effective and more you know, that will work with the humans that you have on your
team and in your organization. And you're also not using unnecessary energy trying to like force something, but instead we're going to address it directly. We're going to address it strategically or going to address it mindfully so that you have a way to work with and through the resistance that is going to come up. Because that's just, you know, pretty much a given, right? There's always, there's always like like any time there's change, expect there to be some resistance or hesitation.
So the goal is to not avoid change or avoid resistance. The goal is to understand that it's going to be there and have a plan, have an approach to work with it. So that is what I wanted to share with you today. Thinking about change, How do you manage it? How do you facilitate it? How it works for yourself, How you can use that self-awareness to then become more effective at managing and facilitating change around you. It's a really, I mean, it's a really fun topic.
We could talk about this for a long time, but for today, that's what I'm going to leave you with. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a great day and I'll talk to you next time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website Kim Nickel com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.