The Heart of Change
It’s Valentine’s Day and a great opportunity to write about matters of the heart. No, I’m not talking about romance, but about the importance of bringing heart and emotional awareness to your change initiatives.
Much of my work focuses on helping executives create positive change within themselves and their teams. One of the main obstacles to change is focusing on what’s logical and excluding what is meaningful or heartfelt for people.
Emotional engagement is important because inertia is one of the biggest obstacles to change. Emotional engagement provides the energy to get over that inertia. In the best cases emotional engagement is positive: passion for a shared vision is one example. However, sometimes people are motivated to change by less positive feelings. For instance, many of my new clients call me about a team building initiative because the conflict and dysfunction within their business or team has reached the point that it is no longer possible to continue without initiating some changes.
I’m not recommending that you create conflict to engage people. Instead look for ways to create positive emotional resonance for your change initiatives. One way to do this is by
establishing personal relevance. One of my corporate clients is in the process of implementing a new customer database. They have been successful in navigating this change because they have helped their staff identify how their lives and the lives of their customers will be improved by the change.What changes are you in process with? Whatever they are, make sure you are getting to the heart of the matter!