Change Sounds Scary? Try an Experiment Instead.

“Let’s treat this as an experiment.” I say this to my coaching clients all the time when they feel stuck contemplating a big change —?everything from changing careers, to showing up as the kind of leader they feel a new role requires, to living a more balanced life.

One client told me they wanted to take better care of themselves, but they were overwhelmed figuring out where to start. So we devised an experiment: That new morning routine they’d been toying with? Try it for a week, and log the results each day. Then, we would talk about how it went, and what they learned.

“Literally log the results?”, they asked, laughing. In fact, my clients often laugh when I invite them to experiment — to commit to a bite-sized, short-term step in service of a larger shift they’re looking to make. To me, this laugh is a sign that we’ve unlocked something — and that the process of change, which so many of us dread, can actually be joyful.

“Let’s treat this as an experiment.” Instantly the temperature goes down. If someone was feeling stressed about making the “right” move, instead they can feel safe and even playful about trying something new. And they feel good that they’re taking action.

As the Buddha said, there are 84,000 doors to enlightenment, what matters is just to walk through one (thank you Aaron Bieber for teaching me this concept, which I’m liberally paraphrasing here). There are infinite ways to start making the change you want to make, but there’s no “correct” way. The only move is to start. Or as my own coach Sabrina Pratt liked to say to me, “You can’t steer a ship unless it’s moving.”

Want to try it? Think of an area of your life where you want to make a change, or something that’s happening that you want to learn to respond to in a different way. Now, let’s experiment:?

1. Design your experiment. Start by envisioning the “biggest smallest step” you could take towards a goal (thank you Robert Ellis for that phrase.) Maybe it’s raising your hand at least once in every meeting for a week, or sending one networking email every day. A client of mine wanted to find more balance in his life and do a better job of prioritizing, “like a CEO does.” So for one week, whenever he was faced with a decision, big or small, he experimented with asking himself, “What would a CEO do?” And then he did it. This “biggest smallest step” is your experiment for the week.
2. Tell one person you trust about the experiment you’re about to conduct, and tell them when you’ll get in touch to tell them the results. This helps you hold yourself accountable.
3. Run the experiment. In other words, try the thing you said you’d try. If you find yourself stopping, simply start again. That’s allowed, it’s just an experiment!
4. Write down the results. This can be in a notes app on your phone, a paper journal, an Excel spreadsheet — whatever is easy and natural for you. You don’t have to share this with the world, but you do want to…
5. Share your results with that one, trusted person. They’re not here to judge your progress. They’re here to offer support and accountability.
6. Reflect on what you’ve learned. What was easy? What was hard? What changed because of the new things you’ve tried?
7. Rinse, repeat. Keep what worked, discard what didn’t, and try again.

Change is both necessary and scary, in work and in life. One of the biggest reasons we resist change is that we’re afraid of getting it wrong. When we shift our mindset to approach change as a series of experiments, rather than one grand decision, it’s liberating, because there’s no pressure to succeed; in fact, the very idea of “success” or “failure” becomes irrelevant, because an experiment cannot succeed or fail, all it can do is teach you something. That’s all it has to do.

And what can any of us ever do, really, other than try, and learn, and try again??

Good luck, my fellow scientists. I’d love to hear how your experiments are going. And if you’re a leader looking for support and accountability bringing more confidence and joy into your leadership, I’d love to help.