When Does Change Happen (how can I spot the before and after)?

Better Conversations

I completed with a client this week and, inevitably I guess, we looked back a bit at what’s happened over the time we’ve been together. That said, I don’t particularly encourage that because memory is faulty, so who knows what really happened.

She remarked,

You know, one thing that strikes me is how much better my conversations are. With my team, of course, but also with colleagues, and even outside work, with friends and family. Everything goes so much more smoothly, it’s relaxed, we agree on more and things just go better.

But I don’t remember when exactly that changed.

I laughed. Of course.

We think we’re creating change but the reality is that it mostly happens when we’re not looking at it.

I do remember the cross-over point, although again, hindsight is a great magnifier.

In the early days she used to talk a lot about the difficult team members, the conflicts, the egos, the many directions they pulled in.

And, at a certain point, she stopped talking about it. It stopped recurring as the topic she wanted to bring for coaching.

We did, once after that i recall, talk about a session with her boss where she felt she had nothing to bring.

Honestly, I don’t feel like I have anything to say to him (the boss), things with the team are all going so well.

I laughed then as well, and I remember we talked about transformative presence and that powerful nature of not talking, about why it is that the way we show up comes from the way we see the world, how what we do comes from what we think, and how that impacts other people without us even saying a word, and sometimes, without us even being aware of it.

I didn’t give it another thought after that, and I guess she didn’t either.

Evolutionary versus Sudden Change

It seems to me that most change happens like that. We’re evolving all the time, small realisations happen, the way we see the world changes and, therefore, what we do and how we behave changes without any direction.

And yes, of course, change happens in areas we give focus to, as this client had done in those early weeks of our coaching. But, because the thing that was a problem no longer exists, it’s often happening below our conscious radar.

And, sure, we have those huge epiphanies too, the moment of a sudden realisation.

I’m sure we’ve all had those too, the moment of looking at something that we do, or don’t do and suddenly asking ourselves,

What the f*** am I doing??

Or maybe it’s just me who experiences them like that ;-).

And then the before and after are somehow 180 degrees different.

Not all change appears like that, most of it is invisible until we look.

I know it’s an obvious thing to say—we all know that one minute you’re at sea level and the next you’re a few thousand feet up a mountain. It’s perhaps more obvious when it comes to action but, somehow. changes in behaviour seem to slip under the radar because we don’t ‘see’ them as clearly.

We can monitor the visible effects, which we do in many areas: steps taken in a day, kilos on the barbell, the way our teams respond to the organisations staff survey, the intangible ‘feel’ of aliveness around us, the love in the air.

Mostly though, when we are playing in the world of the invisible, which is what leadership is all about, it’s kinda hard to spot the join.

With love,

Cathy