When change is a mountain - How effective transition can get you to the top!
Posted on February 27, 2012 by Hani Kafoury MA Psychology, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
Major change feels sometimes like an insurmountable mountain. The article discusses what it takes to make it to the summit and achieve your goals.
“Change is what people go through. Transition is what they experience. The first takes place around them; the second takes place inside them.”
– H. Kafoury
The end of a year and the dawn of a new one are upon us, or are they? 2011 has ended and 2012 has begun at the stroke of midnight for all people around the world. The change of date was clear to all. And yet, how people experienced that stroke of midnight heralding the end and beginning of a year was far from universal. Each one of us has experienced the ending of 2011 and has embraced the beginning of 2012 quite differently. For some it was cause for celebration; for others it may have been one for concern. It is in this nuance of change that the importance of transition is made clear – that the experience of change is what will determine an organization’s ability to thrive on or get bogged down by it.
People typically spend much time on planning change but considerably less time on planning their own transition through it – the art and science of achieving real personal and professional change. It is one’s ability to navigate change that will determine the results that change is supposed to bring. I have been myself through a lot of professional change in my almost 30 years in professional life and have experienced, first hand, its unsettling effect – whether a promotion, a demotion, a relocation or being “let go”, or
launching a new career or a new business, it was seldom just the change that mattered but my reaction to it and my ability to “ride it”. Transition management is the “psychological” management of the change we experience and our ability to effectively “ride it” and reach our goals – without losing our sanity!
One thing I learned climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro is that it is not necessarily fitness or mental powers that get you the summit; it is, in great part, one’s ability to acclimatize, or effectively transition, from one altitude level to the next. What kills people on Kilimanjaro is not falling off the mountain (although about 10 of these fatal incidences are reported every year), it is rather high altitude sickness – or the body’s inability to transition adequately through the higher elevations. That would explain that while the mountain is the same for all 30,000 who attempt its summit every year, 12,000 don’t make it – that’s 40% due to poor “transition”. These could be the probabilities you are faced with whenever you encounter major change in your professional life without adequate transitioning skills. It can be huge not only for your professional life, but for your personal one as well!
As a first step then, you must distinguish between your ability to manage change and that of managing transitions. Not doing so, would amount to assume that because the course is charted and that you have an idea of what to do and how to do it, you will automatically reach the “summit” and make the change you are after happen. Think again. It that was the case, the 30,000 who attempt Kilimanjaro’s summit every year would all make it. Statistics say otherwise.
