How To Make Sense When The World’s A Hot Mess

I talk a lot about change, but 2020 may have me beat, friends.

Every time we turn around, another change. Another challenge. Another hot mess.

After slowly emerging from the initial shock of COVID-19, the abrupt transitions that many of us went through, the learning curve of how to run (or pivot) your business, many of us were looking forward to the summer to finalize solid transition plans back into the workplace.

Instead, across America, we are seeing significant protesting and significant, and much-needed, attention being brought to the issues surrounding  systemic racism in our society. Our coworkers, our families, our friends who are people of color deserve the attention that is being brought. They deserve the national conversation and the shift that will hopefully continue towards real change.

And there it is again: CHANGE.

From a business perspective, working through change is an emotional but also extremely scientific process. Simply put, your teams will follow a predictable path, one that you as a leader can learn to identify and help them through in order for your teams to get back to being active contributors in times of change. If you’ve wondered why you can’t overcome change management challenges, this change curve explains a lot.

To help leaders learn, I’m excited today to announce….well, you’ll have to watch the video to see!

After you’ve checked out the video, won’t you share this with a friend?

If you’re a leader who wants to know how to improve change management, how to overcome change management challenges, and how to think more like top-level executives and entrepreneurs so you can rise to YOUR next level, what I’ve got is for YOU. And if you’ve got a friend or co-worker who could benefit also, I hope you’ll share this!

I’d also like to re-share a resource for you today. This webinar, which I recorded with Julie Kratz of Next Pivot Point back in March, is called “Changing Management Perspectives on Diversity.” If you need help ensuring that diverse voices are heard on your teams, I encourage you to listen and download my guide, “Powerful Questions To Create Change For More Inclusion,” here.

Read the full transcript:

Hey there friend, it’s Stefanie Krievins, the founder of the Pro Troublemaker Nation, where I share tips and encouragement so you can fix your hot messes. We are recording this early June 2020 and the hot messes just keep unfolding. So many of us had hoped to have really solid transition plans back into the workspace, and if your hometown is like my hometown, we now have a situation in many of our cities where protestors are actively protesting because of the George Floyd situation and so many others, and bringing much-needed attention to the systemic and daily discrimination that happens to our friends, our brothers, and sisters who are people of color. And then add on to that, the violence of the looting and the vandalism that is another layer on top of the protests. And so what we had hoped this summer of 2020 to be for many of us is not what it is, and I’m going to say this, my friend, rightfully so. The situations that our friends, our brothers and sisters that are people of color, it deserves this level of attention. I’m never going to condone violence, it deserves this level of attention. What this brings for many of us is we’re working through another layer of change right now, and what we thought our businesses were going to be this summer, where we hoped to have been with our businesses, and our people transitions, and getting back to serving our clients in the way that we’d hoped, it’s just not there. The reality is, is we are working through what’s called the change curve. And I’m not trying to overly sterilize this, but this is the emotional roller coaster that all of us go through any time we’re faced with change, both planned and unplanned, sudden or long-term, whatever it is, and it depends on our level of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, situational awareness as to how fast we can move through this change curve. And so here’s what it is, and we’ll include the tool with this blog post so you have a visual to talk to your team about, but the change curve, it literally a roller coaster of emotions. We start with, boom, situation impact, as human beings, we tend to go to a place of denial and shame and blame, then we go into the depths of despair, where we get really confused, we get some models to use the word depression, I think that that’s a heavy-handed word, but we move to the bottom of the change curve, where we’re unable to problem-solve because we feel stuck, we feel confused, you’ll hear people say at this stage, oh, I just don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do. Well, on the way up on the change curve, that’s where we figure out what we need to do so that we can get to a place of problem-solving, of being strategic, of accepting the new normal, y’all know I hate those words but I don’t have a better one, we get to a place where we can actually move forward and be an active contributor to creating solutions to the problem. That’s the way up on the change curve. And we all need help getting past our stuck and stalled places, that’s why I do what I do. So to add to that, I’ve added on a new podcast for you, my friends, called the Hot Mess Hotline. It is for mid-level leaders who want to think like entrepreneurs, who want to think strategically, who want to align their work across the organization and be future-oriented, to be really awesome problem-solvers, and the way that the entrepreneurial mind is an awesome problem-solver. You can bring that skill set to your level of leadership regardless of your title, and I want to show you how to do that, and I’m gonna show you how to do that in the context of COVID-19 and in the context of what the summer of 2020 has turned out to be for us in our personal lives and in our businesses. So if you’re not on the list already, I need you to get on the email list so that you see every single episode as it comes out, because every single episode has actionable takeaways that you can begin implementing into your team the minute that episode ends. And if you have other mid-level leaders that want to think like entrepreneurs too, please please please forward this email to them, through your social media, through your email service, so that they can get in on this action too. All right, friends, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Wherever you’re watching this video, what are you experiencing right now? What’s going on with you, where do you feel stuck in the change curve? And please, share this with other leaders that are like you, that need to be a part of fixing hot messes, not just wallowing in them and complaining about ’em. Al right Pro Troublemaker, it’s time to get off the Internet and get the real work done, the real change, the meaningful change that needs to happen in our businesses and our communities, and I’ll see you next time.