208 Transition

Over the last while I have been aligning much of what I talk about professionally with my personal and professional life. I have acknowledged that I am sitting in the middle of unending, continuous change.

In my private life, I occupy an ending. My mum and mother-in-law are both over 85. Their end will be a foreign element introduced into our small family. There will be a period of chaos and ultimately change when they pass away. My wife and I will be orphans, facing a new set of questions about how we choose to live our life with our son and our daughter.

In my professional life, I am starting my own consulting business. This comes after a period of continuous transition involving the end of my secure public service career, and a particularly difficult period where I tried to re-enter the workforce as an employee.

If I align these two worlds with Satir curves, I am experiencing a late-stage status quo alongside a period of chaos. Shifting between these two stages makes competing and irreconcilable demands on my system. It also places our family under considerable strain.

Recently I discussed the value of stabilisation in ongoing and continuous change. Without stabilising people impacted by change, there are very real risks relating to adaptation and wellbeing. In the worst cases, those impacted by change will experience burnout.

I have experimented with my own plan to stabilise myself through personal and professional change. This has been greatly assisted by Doug Fleener’s work on the day, in particular the application of his six principles: the day, intention, responsibility, simplicity, improvement, and giving to get. For the last week I have been setting up each day through a checklist of questions spanning these six areas. Each night I review and reflect on my progress against them.

This process has proven incredibly useful in managing the small (and large) fluctuations that have occurred in my mood and responses as I work my way through significant change. It has also attuned me to what constitutes performance in context. The latter is something I think is very important to managing change and transition in the workplace.

So far, the key takeaways from this approach include:

Increasing awareness of the day builds an understanding of your limits. This helps you understand what your boundaries are. It also allows you to implement the scripts required to maintain these boundaries. This preserves energy. A win.

This type of reflection focuses on what is within your sphere of influence. Pausing to think more about what you can control — and then acting on it (even if it means being quiet) — preserves energy.

As you think more about your boundaries and what you can control, you begin to understand the patterns around you. I am referring to patterns of behaviour and activity that have the potential to drain your energy and impact your wellbeing.

This process can seem time-consuming. However, when you calculate it against the impact of slipping into a funk because of poor boundaries and self-control, it ends up saving time and enhancing performance.

A former running coach of mine used to refer to cumulative effort — the gains built up over time from determined and considered effort. I have just started this approach, and early indicators suggest it helps you perform during times of unending or continuous change.

The more I work with this, the clearer it becomes: stabilisation is not a luxury in continuous change — it is the discipline that makes change survivable.