What making sense of a break-up teaches me about Change Management

A little bit over a year ago, on an early August Thursday to Friday night, my world came crushing down. You know those special effects in movies that make everything spin at nauseating speed, then explode into billions of tiny shards, the screen goes black, and you get this ringing in your ears that makes it hard to even breathe? That is the closest I can get to putting how it felt into words. We were laughing and talking about anything and everything like we always had, even making our usual inside jokes about “the Covid-special third party in our relationship – the internet connection”, searching for plane tickets to finally resume and enjoy our new life together in Switzerland after the logistics nightmare of the pandemic, looking forward to filling all our dreams and plans made for two, as well as the new home, with vibrant life and play and laughter. With us. And then, two hours later, nothing. Literally. And nothing ever since.

Today’s #tuesdaychangemanagementrandomthought has been in the making for a long time. Not in writing, but in the making of the decision to publish it. It took me the least amount of time to write it in comparison to all the other editions in the series, maybe I have been carrying it in me all along.

Three separate occurrences over the past two days prompted me to publish it today.

First, over the weekend, I got a connect invite from someone who happened to find a recording of a talk on self-rejection I gave a couple of years ago. The presentation started with “Hello, my name is Minola, and I am a self-rejection subject matter expert.” By pressing the “Publish” button today, I want to change that into “Hello, my name is Minola, and I am a recovering self-rejection subject matter expert.”

Yesterday, I started working on the content of a leadership team development workshop, and I looked for some samples of leadership stands. I was reminded of my own, one I wrote a few years back when we launched an organizational culture think tank with a handful of awesomely inspiring people. By pressing the “Publish” button today, I want to be able to confirm it is still valid: “I stand for unwavering authenticity that creates a safe space for those around me to feel inspired, empowered, and accepted to live in and by their full and unaltered truth.”

Lastly, I realized this morning that this would be edition no. 99 in a series of 100, my self-imposed limit. So, it is befitting to talk about endings so close to the wrap-up, and yet at a safe distance to still be able to end it on a positive note. By pressing the “Publish” button today, I want to rolemodel the last takeaway of this issue, as best as I possibly can.

Find a safe space to just “talk it out of your system”. I found out that, for me personally, simply putting fuzzy thoughts and feelings and “the knot in my stomach” into words, as coherently as possible (I had to teach myself not to have rigid expectations of coherence all the time) made everything more bearable and got me one infinitesimally tiny step at a time closer to making sense out of what happened. Hearing it said out loud also helped me sometimes with putting it into perspective. I have found it easier to listen to myself while speaking with others. Change work comes with a huge load of distressing, unsettling, deeply disruptive and oftentimes soul-crushing information and action, for both those who lead it and those experiencing it. It comes with its own sense of loss and grief, for each of us in different ways, shapes and forms. It makes a hugely positive difference if we have a safe space to just “talk it out of our system” with a person or small group of people, in a safe environment, with no rigid expectations of full academic-level coherence. Just talk it out. And if the same words and things come out over and over again, let them come out. Over and over again, until they hold no more power over your mind and heart and soul. Talk them out into nothingness. Remember: if you’re not speaking it - you’re storing it, and that gets heavy.

Ask for help and learn to ask for the help that helps you. It has been feeling like an infinite rollercoaster. Some days it feels like a distant, hazy memory, I even question myself whether any of it actually happened. Some other days, I wake up and the first thing I feel is like all the million small pieces my heart broke into get broken into infinitely smaller ones. It is excruciating. And sudden. It is excruciatingly sudden and suddenly excruciating. There have been days when I could not, still cannot “hear” solutions, I don’t want to “learn the lesson”, “trust the process”, “practice gratitude”, “say affirmations”, “change the door nameplate, burn his s**t and move on” (definitely more tempting than the affirmations), “stay kind and compassionate.” Honestly, I just want to breathe, like really breathe, simply breathe a full, deep breath. People want to help, or at least to say something helpful, and I truly and deeply believe this drive comes from a place of genuine care and love. Yet sometimes I need to push back on it because… well, the help is not helping. The challenge is to push back in such a way that I still make my hurt heard and keep the (positive) relationship with the person who offered help the best way they knew how or in a way that they found helpful for themselves in similar situations. It is often said that we comfort others in the ways we want(ed)/need(ed) to be comforted, so an offer of help is more about the person who makes it than ourselves. Which makes the accountability and ownership of asking for help, and even more importantly, of asking for the help we need, our very own prerogative. I also know there is a fine, fluid line between “love” and “tough love”, but I am not speaking about that. A very good friend of mine calls it the “List of Toxic Shoulds and Should-Haves”. You know what I mean, that “Instructions Manual” that apparently is out in the world and you didn’t get your copy, with clear regulations and descriptions regarding the length, intensity and manifestations of your grief, the correct sequencing of feelings, emotions and thoughts, all the steps and tools for the mental, emotional and residential, if applicable, cleansing, culminating with the ultimate exorcism of any shred of self-doubt, self-judgement, and carbs-fueled self-pity for all eternity evermore. My takeaway into change work is that while good intentions and genuine caring are all-encompassing and infinite, the needs and requirements for help are exceptionally individually specific and have boundaries. Help and support should be offered as most meaningful and helpful, not simply as readily available, “time-tested”, and with an impressive collective track-record.

Turn shame into courage. Pain, hurt, longing, sadness, regret, loss, anguish, confusion, hope, denial, more hurt, yearning, loads more hope, mind-numbing and soul-crushing grief, I have been feeling them all. On an endless repeat loop. I struggle with anger. I can’t feel it. It comes very easy to feel angry at myself, though. Somehow along the journey, an overwhelming feeling started to form, drowning all the others. Shame. I caught myself ruminating: “What was I thinking??? I wasn’t some 15-year-old, na?ve, innocent, shielded from the world in a remote, disconnected settlement in the virgin forests along the Amazon… How have I let this happen? How have I fallen for it?” Well, it did happen. And although this wasn’t my first break-up, it is definitely the first such event of its kind that counts as a “before and after” delineating moment in my life. Maybe I will never fully understand why, maybe I am not even supposed to get that understanding. We went on a walk recently with one of my friends, and I confessed struggling with shame to her. She listened to me, then asked me: “What is the opposite of shame?” As I was letting out a deep sigh (secretly bracing myself for an excerpt from the “Instructions Manual”), she said “It’s courage. Think about it! Just let it settle in your mind and heart, it is courage.” I have been challenging myself ever since to think about it like this. And replace “shame” with “courage”. I have been keeping post-it notes close by, and every single time I felt a shame-thought creeping up, I reached for a post-it and wrote it out replacing “shame” with “courage”. Courage to feel everything I have been feeling. Courage to speak about it. Courage to try again. Courage to simply listen and be there for someone else. Courage to say, “I know, me too.” Courage to ask for help. Courage to ask for the help that helps me. I have come across shame in change work, it usually follows right after a “blame game”. More usual occurrences are those of embarrassment, discomfort, unease. I have seen them manifested in people around me, I have also experienced them within organizational settings. There should be a “change oath” mandatory for anyone going into change work binding them to turn and help people around them turn shame into courage. It takes courage to initiate a change. It takes infinitely more courage to try again after a failure. It takes courage to ask for change support. It takes even more courage to push back and ask for change help that actually helps. It takes courage to speak about your organizational change journey. It takes courage to simply listen and be there for someone else. It takes courage to say, “I know, me too.”

We have been speaking about imposter syndrome in our professional lives for years now. In full honesty, I have been experiencing some sort of imposter syndrome in my personal life after the break-up. It feels like carrying around huge chunks of self-doubt, self-judgement, deafening echoes and heavy inertia of all the “not enough” self-assessments… It takes safe space to talk it out of my system, loads of help that helps, and… something else that I have yet to earn the right to call “courage.” ?There is a bit of dialogue in the “Wizard of Oz” movies (regardless of the screen adaptation version) that perfectly describes my feeling.

“Wizard of Oz: As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don't know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

Tin Woodman: But I still want one.”

Until next week, keep calm and courageously hold on to “But I still want one.”