Ever try to give someone advice and meet resistance?

Ever try to drive change in an organization and end up feeling frustrated, angry, or defeated?

I just attended the Andrus Sanctuary’s Network Days Conference, which provided an excellent paradigm for change.

The change journey begins when something is ending, and then there is a transition, and eventually a new beginning.

The Change Journey We Often Ignore

We tend to directly announce what we want or expect to happen or what we expect people should do without understanding the stages that people and organizations go through during change. When we do this, what we want is people to commit to the new way of doing and being.

But we are often shocked when that doesn’t work out.

People were comfortable with whatever they were doing and the results that they achieved. Change means new ways of acting and that whatever results they’d gotten comfortable with are going to change as well. Our survival brains are binary, good/bad. What we are used to is good, what we are forced to change to is bad.

Change means something is ending. Just the fact that we are advising people or an organization to give up what they have done in the past triggers survival instincts; their limbic brain goes on overdrive; stress hormones spike. Their emotional state goes from positive or confident (because they were able to act in the old environment) to negative (anxious, fearful, and/or angry).

The typical process people and organizations go through is denial (as in “we don’t need to change anything”) and then to overt or covert resistance.

At that point, if we want to move forward, those involved have to be able to transition to an exploratory mindset and then to commitment. But we can’t move forward until the others are regulated, either because they have been able to self-regulate or we have been able to coregulate them.

We have to help them cross the river to the other side.

The SELF Process

The process that the Sanctuary Institute embeds in its work is S. E. L. F. for Safety, Emotional Regulation, Loss, and Future.

The first step is to foster a sense of safety, where the other party feels they can trust the change maker(s), that they will emerge okay on the other side, that they have agency, and they the parties are connected.

An exploration mindset exists only when the survival instincts, the limbic brain, has been quieted and the individual(s) can access their resourceful brain or prefrontal cortex.

In exploration mode, we can all have honest conversations about loss, what will be lost, what trade-offs we will have to make, where we will need to expend extra effort, and where we will need patience and grace when things go wrong.

Finally we can move forward into the future with commitment, accepting that the past is over.

If you are familiar with the MindShifting: Conflict and Collaboration book, you’ve seen in action the steps to help people transition from resistance to commitment. Plus we have a quick guide with seven steps that you can download free below.