The Grief In Change

When faced with the question ‘How do you cope with change?’ Most people in an interview will answer, oh I love change, I embrace it…or something to that effect.?

For some this may actually be true but for most of us change brings up some rather difficult emotions that are often uncomfortable and in many ways disruptive to our lives.

I think part of the reason we find change so difficult is our inability to properly grieve the things we leave behind. In fact I don’t think any of us really know how to grieve at all. It’s definitely not something that we’re taught, not in the western world anyway. After all, grief for most of us is primarily associated with death. Probably the most taboo subject of them all.?

…But hold on, how you may ask is ‘death’ and ‘grief’ the territory of executive coaching??

The reality is there is always ‘a death’ of something, figuratively speaking, as we move through change. A change of job, moving to a new department, colleagues leaving the organisation or inevitably more traumatic, being made redundant.

Change in itself can often be the avoidance of the pain of grief. We don’t want to feel the loss so we just keep moving forwards and try (mostly unconsciously) to keep a distance between what we leave behind. Fooling ourselves that the painful, messy and sometimes shameful feelings can simply remain in the rear view mirror and neatly boxed away forever.?

Unfortunately though that’s not how it works. I have personally experienced so much change over the last 4 years. I nearly lost my event staffing business with the onset of covid, we then merged with another firm and I exited the business that I’d spent nearly 18 years of my life building and left London, my home for 17 of those years.?

Whilst I can acknowledge there were exciting parts of this and at the time the change felt like an adventure. The admission that in each of the changes the unconscious shadow was that I had been trying to get away from the sense of failure.?

In that I was partly running away from these things to avoid a deep seated sense that I don’t want to fail. That I was petrified of failure. That if I stood still, failure would eventually catch up with me. A sense of failure that had manifested itself to not being ‘well suited’ to school and struggling academically.?

It wasn’t until my coaching supervisor asked me a very simple question during a session that I started to truly acknowledge everything I’d been through. She asked me…

“What have you lost?”

It’s funny now to look back but I realised just how much I had lost in the process. How I’d simply not acknowledged any of this in my rampant desire to just ‘keep moving forwards’.?

Why may you ask is any of this important. Is it not just wallowing in our past? Will doing so much reflection just stop us moving on??

In reality it is quite the opposite. In that our emotions and the identification of ‘how we are feeling’ can create the greatest unlocking of our potential at work.?

Alan De Botton is his incredibly poignant book (A Therapeutic Journey) sums it up the best. He says “To be liberated from the past, we need to get in touch with what it actually felt like. We need to sense, in a way we may not have done for decades the emotional pains of our past.”?

In the context of work it’s perfectly natural for us to go into fight, flight or freeze mode in an attempt to manage high levels of stress during the actual event. However, it’s only after we return to safety that we begin to take stock of what was lost, and feel the effects and start to grieve.?

My challenge to everyone reading this though is don’t be afraid to acknowledge the loss of things. Even when paradoxically the change feels like a positive one. As I have mentioned there is always a loss and the recognition of that can be an incredibly cathartic process.