330 Part V: Integrating Your Learning
Getting Help on the Way
You may find that managing simple change on your own is easy. For
introducing bigger changes, however, getting help facilitates the process.
For personal change, you can get relevant help, such as that of a coach, a
nutritionist, a financial advisor, an estate agent, or if you think of a holiday as
a temporary change, you may employ the services of a travel counsellor.
For making change at work, using change champions is essential. A department
of 500 people was being restructured. The staff were broken up into groups of
- Each group was assigned a staff manager and all information was funnelled
through that manager. The 20 managers bought into the change and went out
and sold the change to their teams. They were in effect the ‘change champions’.
This reorganisation turned out to be one of the more successful, with minimum
disruption and loss of productivity. Another reason given for the success of
the project was that the management team and the top 200 people out of 500
all had individual one-on-one coaching sessions. Management placed a high
value on clear communication and timely support systems for employees.
Strengthening resources
Throughout this book, we talk about the need to be flexible. Being willing to
experiment is an aspect of being flexible and you’re more likely to experiment if
you’re in a resourceful state. When you feel resourceful, you can find ways
around problems more easily. This mindset, in turn, makes change a lot
easier for you to deal with than if you were to feel resentful.
Alan, a salesman, was unstoppable when he felt well and energetic. Other days
he just couldn’t cut the mustard. He decided to make a memory of himself on
one of his unstoppable days. To do this, he picked a day on which he’d been
really successful and wrote down, in graphic detail, exactly what he’d seen,
heard, and done to make himself feel so energetic and unstoppable. He used
his notes to create an anchor of being unstoppable (Chapter 9 has all the
info on how to use anchors). Initially, Alan did the exercise with a friend
who helped him follow each step of the exercise correctly. When he could
remember the steps, he was able to do the exercise by himself. His sales went
up by 15 per cent in the first three months after he started employing his
‘unstoppable anchor’ before seeing a sales prospect.
