90 Leading with NLP
results. They also tend to recruit those people who fit best
with the management culture, thereby perpetuating and
strengthening the particular culture and way of working.
When an organization starts to change, many people resist,
of course. This resistance should be honoured as the other
side of the stability that has allowed the organization to be
successful in the past.
We form habits as a way of dealing with uncertainty. Un-
certainty itself comes from the constant change in the world.
We need a measure of stability in our lives, our psychological
balance depends on it, just as our life depends on keeping a
stable internal environment in our bodies with constant
body temperature, fluid balance, breathing, nervous activity
and heartbeat. When we find something that works, it makes
sense to keep doing it.
In our bodies we have homeostatic systems to literally
dampen down any change that becomes too uncomfortable.
When we become too hot, we sweat, more blood flows to the
skin, so we lose more heat. The more we sweat, the more
heat we lose and the more we cool down. So, the hotter we
get, the more we compensate. This is called homeostasis,
which means ‘keeping the same state’.
We have similar systems in our personal lives that keep us in
balance. We have a pre-set ‘comfort level’ but, unlike the fluid
level, we can influence it directly. The greater the gap between
our desired comfort level and our actual level, the more dis-
turbed we feel. The greater the gap, the more we try to damp
down the disturbance until we are back inside our comfort
zone. Change can, of course, bring about a huge difference
between our desired comfort level and our actual level.
How can we use this? First look on reluctance as the friend
that warns you of change. Secondly, remember that your so-
cial life has far fewer restraints than your physiology. Our
circumstances do change, so trying to stay exactly the same
in the face of continuous change would be not only foolish,
but also impossible. We have to keep the relationship between
our environment and ourselves constant, but we do not have
to keep our lives the same. In fact we always have to change