When Does Change Happen
--
And why is it so hard to spot the join?
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…
