Manage Change Mindfully

Our first key of Mindful Change Management is Supportive Behaviors. Developing and encouraging a growth mindset can help to capitalize on the supportive behaviors that contribute to successful change efforts, including cultivating self-compassion and self-awareness to help us navigate challenges better. Cultivating a growth mindset is all about learning, embracing mistakes, and confronting potential limitations. The learning curve comes from making sure we stay focused on the process of something instead of its outcome. And that focus can help you to be more effective with managing change.

Commitment to change is most often linked with positive attitudes, while negative attitudes are often linked with resistance to change. Positive attitude around change stems from someone's belief in their ability to perform well on change-related tasks. You can help foster a belief in your own ability to manage change by developing the competency of self-efficacy, which frames accomplishments in your life in terms of skills instead of luck. Approaching your ability to manage change as a skill can actually help you to navigate change better. Today’s mindfulness practice can help develop this sense of belief so that you can influence positive attitude and commitment to change to help support successful change.

Identifying and being aware of the emotions and thought processes surrounding change is a critical step toward addressing them. Change requires people to evolve their mental pictures of how their world operates, and people can experience a significant sense of instability when change impacts something they rely on. You can support these mental and emotional adjustments that come with change by developing the competency of emotional intelligence. We consider emotional intelligence to be a link between our feelings and our actions. Developing an awareness of this link is what makes emotional intelligence work in favor of your intentions and goals. To build this foundation, the first step is being aware of your own emotions.

In addition to the mental and emotional effects of change, people experience different degrees of connection with goals related to the change. You can foster a more deep and genuine connection to the change goals that resonate most with you by developing the competency of intersectionality. The focus of today’s mindfulness session will be developing an alignment between various layers of your identity to discover parts of a change that feel genuine for you. Rather than thinking of each of your identity layers as a separate part of yourself, you can think of each one as a tool available to you to help navigate change. Identifying what connects you to the purpose and outcome of a change can help pave the way for a more comfortable and effective experience.

Mindful Change Management supports a view of change that considers the wellbeing of all stakeholders. The prevailing attitude toward people’s reactions to change has been that the standard response to change is, “What’s in it for me?” However, recent research has shown that people consider the implications of change events not only for themselves, but also for others. You can highlight the positive effects of change efforts for many types of stakeholders by developing the competency of self-compassion. A strong foundation in self-compassion can equip us to manage better with many aspects of change, including better coping strategies and reduced stress levels. Today’s mindfulness session will give you tools both to manage change more effectively for yourself, and to extend any benefits of the change to others.