Make New Year's Resolutions and changes that last!
Posted by: Claudia Raab in New Training Success on
Jan 12, 2009
Happy New Year and welcome back to Raab & Raab Performance Consulting in 2009! Have you made up your resolutions for the New Year? Are you ready for change? Great! We're here to help and support you!
Change is good. However, as we all know, changing is not easy. With 2009 being just 12 days old you might already notice that your New Year's Resolution and best-laid plans for change have slightly started to fall through. Why? Prof. Robert Keagan and Dr. Lisa Lahey of the elite Harvard Graduate School of Education reveal an answer in their new book "Immunity to change".
The American psychologists and experts in adult learning, who received a significant research grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have studied the phenomena of why people can't change although they're desperate to do so over decades. In a recent interview Prof. Keagan spoke about their findings when working with educational leaders of schools that needed change to achieve better results:
"Despite the best intentions of all parties, we have learned that organizations and individuals have powerful means of "protecting" themselves from the very changes to which they aspire. These "immunities" to change help to hold in place the status quo despite how hard leaders work to improve schools and districts."
What is relevant in the education sector is relevant for any business, government, the public sector or individuals: To address the phenomena of the "Immunities to change". Prof. Keagan's solution: “Instead of regarding these behaviors as obstacles in need of elimination, we take them as unrecognized signals of other, usually unspoken, often unacknowledged, goals or motivations.”
Here's an example: If you're goal is to delegate more and you find yourself not doingit, the reason could be that you have an "unspoken, unacknowledged goal or motiviation" hindering you: A belief that if you don't get things done, no one else will and the project will end up in a catastrophy. To protect yourself from a bad outcome you subconsciously overthrow your decision to delegate.
Discovering underlying goals that subconsciously are more important to you than your conscious goals and consciously assessing their "real" importance helps you stay on track. Give it a go and remember: We are here to help. We'll help you to achieve your goals and make your New Year's Resolution work. Simply call 0425 785 143 now!