Eat More Dog Food
Over the last week, two things happened that made me revisit how tough change can be. First, we were running a NLP (self-coaching skills) practitioner course last week. It was beautiful to see people start to step into what they want to achieve and focus on for themselves, their careers, their families, and everything that comes with us being human. And them coming to the realisation that change needs to happen. I think sometimes when that happens, it feels like you're shaking the foundations. I recognise that for myself.
The second thing that made me really revisit this element of change and how significant it is, and sometimes how tough it is, was running a leadership program. When you step into leadership from a traditional view of thinking around management, the shift required is massive. The reason I'm well aware of this is that I made a significant change, and this is the point I want to raise around dog-fooding (behaving in the way you encourage other people to behave). As a coach, it's really important that we eat our own dog food and I want to share a change that happened for me that I worked hard to achieve.
A number of years ago I worked in financial services, and I loved my job and the people that I worked with. My career was really rocketing, which was great, and I had a number of leaders that really supported me. The trouble was, I was running the strategy where if the focus came to me, I would absolutely fall apart and I'd go red. I'd hold my breath, I couldn't speak, I felt really, really hot, and my hands were really cold. The realisation felt like it was just who I was and I would run strategies to avoid the thing that was causing me that amount of pain. So I would write emails instead of attending meetings or I would ask for people to say my piece, but the idea had come from me originally. You know, all these things that I did to avoid. I was just reminding myself of that challenge that I went through.
I'll put together a deck (PowerPoint) if this is helpful for people drop me a note, send me a DM, or just put your name in the comments below and I'd happily send this out to you. I think generally what happens is that we go from the status quo to whatever we want to be in the new normal.
Sometimes we can reject the change. “Can I avoid the change?" “Can I accommodate the change without impacting things too much?” “How do I squeeze the change in?” At some point, you get to “Okay. I need to accept that this change is going to happen,” even though sometimes we really want the change to happen.
We still go through this stuff. I was just thinking some associated feelings might be reticence, resistance, hesitancy, discomfort, fatigue, frustration, confusion. This was a lot of what I went through. Wouldn't it be great if you can move from the old status quo to the new normal in a much quicker way?
I think that's where the benefit comes from having a coach and the right program for you. If this is helpful, please drop me a line and I’ll happily send it to you. And I'll also put in a link so you can book a quick 30-minute call. If you are in change work, and your job is to effect change in some way, such as leadership, change management, or project management. It could be any of those things or that you personally are going through some change right now. There's either a goal you want to achieve or change coming your way. And it's rocking the foundations a little bit.
Let's have a chat and because there are so many tools and techniques that we have in our toolkit. Book a call in here: https://calendly.com/kepaga-discovery-call/30-minute-discovery-call