Tag: insecurity

Mindfulness and Personal Transitions During Organisational Change

Change in our personal lives and in an organisational setting can generate anxiety, fear, insecurity and anger.  This discomfort can be expressed as resistance to change and lead to a wide range of unproductive behaviours that can be harmful to us as individuals as well as for the organisations we work in.  William and Susan Bridges identified three broad stages of personal transition in the context of organisational change.  In their 2017 book, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, they explained that each of us go through these stages at different rates for different changes depending on the our perception of the impact of the changes.  The three stages they identified are (1) endings – where the focus is on loss, (2) neutral zone – involves a “wait and see” orientation and (3) new beginnings – putting commitment and energy behind the change.  Their book provides a range of managerial strategies that can be employed by organisations to help people transition from endings to new beginnings. They emphasize that without these strategies individuals and organisations can become stuck in either the endings stage or the neutral zone, resulting in illness and organisational decline.

Mindfulness and personal transitions during organisational change

Wendy Quan, a certified organisational change agent and creator of The Calm Monkey (Mindfulness Meditation in the Workplace), had a personal experience that gave her a deep insight into how people deal with a confronting and challenging change.  She was diagnosed with cancer after many years in multiple organisational change roles. This personal challenge led her to seek out mindfulness practices, and meditation in particular, to help her deal with this devastating illness.  Through her meditation practice she came to accept her illness and all that it entailed, and realised that she had a choice – she could view herself as a victim or take a proactive approach that would enable her to lead the best life possible, given her health setback.

This led to a further insight in that she realised that she could employ her understanding of organisational change and mindfulness to help others in an organisational setting.  She was able to draw on the research of William and Susan Bridges and developed a refined model of personal transitions.  She focused on the psychological change processes involved and identified five transition points in an individual’s psychological journey during organisational change:

  • Awareness: becoming aware of your thoughts, emotions, reactions and behaviour when facing the change
  • Understanding: gaining insight into the “why” of your holistic response – body and mind (recognising that this is a normal reaction to a confronting and challenging change)
  • Acceptance: accepting “what is”, not denying your current reality (e.g. a changed role, loss of a job or status)
  • Commitment: moving beyond acceptance to committing to adopt a positive, proactive response to improve your personal experience of the change, “taking things into your own hands” – self-management instead of reactivity
  • Advocacy: promoting the change and its positive elements if your energy level and role enable this.

Research into mindfulness and personal transitions during organisational change

Wendy was able to apply her insights in her work situation to help her colleagues through difficult change processes.  She moved beyond working with a small group to establishing a weekly mindfulness meditation “drop-in” where participants could share their experiences of change, both personal and organisational, and identify what they were trying to cope with and how they were going about it.  After a few years, she had 185 people on this drop-in program (highlighting the psychological challenge of organisational change) and this enabled her to undertake formal research of the impact of her approach of combining mindfulness with change management insights.

Her research was published in a study titled Dealing with Change Meditation Study which can be downloaded here.   Wendy indicated that her approach revolved around two key points of intervention, (1) raising awareness of the personal, holistic impact of a change process and (2) focusing on the future to develop a more constructive response so that the individual undergoing organisational change can have a better experience of the change and make decisions about their future.  Participants in the study were asked to focus on a challenging change and listen three times over a two-week period to a 15-minute, guided meditation focused on positively dealing with the change.

Resources for personal transitions during organisational change

Wendy, building on her own experience of combining mindfulness and organisational change insights, has developed several resources that people can use to assist their personal change processes or to facilitate the transition for others undergoing organisational change:

Wendy also provides a series of free and paid meditation podcasts on her website.

Reflection

I have been engaged in organisational change consultancy for over 40 years, and more recently undertaken extensive research and writing about mindfulness, as well as developing my own mindfulness practices, including meditation.  However, identifying a practical approach to combining the two related skill sets has alluded me to date.  Wendy, through her experience of a personal health crisis, has been able to introduce a very effective, evidence-based approach to using mindfulness to help people transition through organisational change processes.  She has been able to demonstrate that as we grow in mindfulness we can become more aware of our personal response to an organisational change, develop an increased understanding of the nature of that response, increase our acceptance of our changing reality and gradually build a commitment to shaping our future in a positive and constructive way.  Her work resonates with the insights and approach of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, as well as that of Susan David who focuses on using mindfulness to develop “emotional agility”.

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Image by Geralt from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Loosening the Hold of False Beliefs

In a previous post, I explored the nature of harmful beliefs, how they arise and the negative impact they have in our lives. In this post, I want to focus on ways to challenge and manage these harmful beliefs and how to progressively break free of their hold over us – releasing the tight fist that constrains our interactions with others and blocks our creativity.

Again, I will be drawing on the wisdom and insight offered by Tara Brach in her new course, Releasing Negative Beliefs & Thought Patterns: Using Mindfulness to Break Out of the Trance.   Tara argues that the way to break free of the hold of our false beliefs is to recognise them for what they are, investigate them and their impact in our lives and practice mindful awareness to ground ourselves in external reality, rather than live out a figment of our imagination.

False beliefs – their true nature

Tara explains that many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves and others are not only harmful but are untrue – they are false beliefs. She maintains that they are “true but not real”. The beliefs are true in the sense that we create them in our minds and experience them in our bodies – whether the tightness of fear, the restlessness of anxiety or the unsettled stomach flowing from worry. Tara cites Hildegard de Bingen who speaks of the impact of our beliefs in terms of creating an interpretation of reality – developing a mental map that is not the territory or as Hildegard describes the unreality of our self-beliefs, “An interpreted world is not a home”.

So, the starting point for loosening the hold of these false beliefs is to recognise them for what they are – an interpretation we impose on the world and people around us. We substitute our beliefs about ourselves and others for the real world – “we are unworthy and unlovable”; “they are more intelligent and resourceful”; “we do not deserve people’s appreciation or kindness”; “they are so much more accepted and accomplished than us”.

False beliefs can lead to “the disease to please”

False beliefs can lead to what Hariet Braiker describes as The Disease to Please. This “disease” manifests in a number of ways and can lead to “people-pleasing habits” designed to gain another person’s approval. The people-pleasing person puts the needs of everyone else before their own which leads to personal overload and ill-health. They may denigrate their own contribution and over-inflate the contribution of others. These behaviours are self-defeating because the perceived ingratiating behaviour is viewed by others as insincere and “over-the-top” – thus negatively impacting significant relationships.

False beliefs about oneself lie at the heart of these habits and are reflected in a mindset that “being nice” will ward off rejection or harm by others – a potential rejection or harming perceived as warranted by us because we believe that we are “unworthy” or “unlovable”. These deep-seated, self-beliefs can arise from past adverse or traumatic experiences, including abuse by our parents or others.

Investigating false beliefs

Tara suggests that false beliefs about ourselves and others can be sustained by us because they are never subject to investigation or personal inquiry. She provides a series of questions that can help with this inquiry and lead to enhanced self-awareness. I have reframed the questions below which can be explored in a meditation session on a conflictual encounter or a blocked endeavour:

  1. What is my belief that is getting in the way? – naming the belief to tame its impacts
  2. How true is this belief or is it simply untrue?
  3. What happens for me when I entertain this belief – in what ways do I suffer, and my relationships/endeavours suffer, because of this belief?
  4. What would my experience of relationships (or of the achievement of creative endeavours) be like if I no longer entertained this belief?

Tara suggests that the release from false beliefs is a progressive “letting go” that can be blocked sometimes by our need for control. In letting go of false beliefs, we can experience uncertainty and insecurity because we have created a vacuum – we have not replaced these beliefs with ones that are grounded in reality. Through meditation, we can learn to substitute beliefs that affirm our worth, our lovability and our good intentions.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation on conflicted situations or blocked endeavours, we can name our false beliefs, challenge their distortion of reality and loosen their hold on us. This will free us to engage more fully and positively in relationships and release our energy for creative endeavours.

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Image source: courtesy of johnhain on Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.