Proactive Change: How You Can Be A Change Agent with Michelle Rozen

0:00I don't believe in change management, I believe in life management. Dr. Michelle Rosen, she is the change doctor. So change is about taking everything that hurts you and doesn't work for you and figuring out what you are doing over and over again without even thinking that brings to that result that you can change. She's been on NBC, ABC, Fox, she's all over the place. Written some amazing books, The Two Second Decision. The brain hates change, hates it with passion because we want to be comfortable. How are you going to do things differently to get a different result from a very mindful place?

0:31Michelle, listen, change is the big subject of the day right now because literally it's the only consistent. How do you define change in your world? Because it's your profession. It's your thing. We've had a panel of change management professionals right before the pandemic. Like, Brad, this is like two days before shutdown when somebody, you know, we would put a few hand sanitizers and think that we beat the pandemic that week. Yeah. So that was a panel in New York. And I remember telling them very clearly, I don't believe in change management. So that word change, like it's a big word. So what does that actually mean?

1:05I told them, I don't believe in change management. I believe in life management. So change is about taking everything that hurts you because we talked about that pain, right? Taking everything that hurts you and doesn't work for you and figuring out what you are doing over and over again without even thinking that brings to that result that you can change. The average person makes about 35 ,000 decisions every single day. And it's not humanly possible to make 35 ,000 decisions. So a lot of those decisions we make without even thinking, like autopilot all the way. And some of those automated decisions take us to places that we've been at 100 times over in our lives, just because this is how we do things.

1:44Somebody triggered you and you've snapped like 1 ,000 times before in your life. So the question is, how are you going to do things differently to get a different result from a very mindful place? And that's the essence, not just of change, but of success, transformation, happiness, you know, purpose, everything. How do people lead through change? Because I know you teach a bunch on this and I've loved so many of your learnings on this for me to apply personally. Give everybody else, though, the things that I've had the privilege of learning from you. So when you lead a group of people through change, I think the most important thing to understand for the leader is how difficult it is.

2:22It's really hard. It's really challenging. The brain hates change, hates it with passion because we want to be comfortable, because we want things to stay the way they are, because it's less energy for the brain to spend. The first place I usually start with is the compassion piece and the understanding of what you're actually asking people to do and why they resist you. human factor of leadership that has been sort of a growing trend over the years before the pandemic became very central to leadership and the soft skills are now critical so if you're the kind of leader who leads a team through change the first thing you need to do is work on yourself work on your people's skills because if you don't have the compassion and you don't have the ability to work well with others and to show gratitude you're not going to make it you can have a stellar process for change management, it's not going to work.

3:16You've got to be a person first. So it's back to like the things that our mothers taught us, that our fathers taught us, that our grandparents had to be a person. One of the things I noticed in many of my companies pre-COVID to post-COVID was a change in the culture of the organization. So take me through how, you know, we can, I guess everyone's back, but bring back that feeling, I guess, in people? How do you get that culture back? How do you get that feeling back in people? There's a need of leaders to understand that this is a new situation now. And let's not forget that a lot of millennials came into the workforce.

3:53There's a lot of new young people that have a completely different mindset. You need to lead them completely differently. They need a lot of purpose. You know, they interact very differently. So there's a lot. The savvy leaders who are now, you know a top leadership position there's a lot of new things for them to learn they're not in their comfort level too because you think that they would know how to do it by now but everything changed and what um i was talking to leaders about it that linkedin live is the need to be very tuned in and mindful to where people's minds are at because what we're perceiving as people's needs right now is not necessarily going to be where everything will be in a year from now Change is more like, oh my gosh, everything changes all the time.

4:39How do I perform at my best within all this change that is happening so quickly? So that leads me then to reactive versus proactive change. Explain to people the mindset, I guess, between the two and how do they get into that proactive mindset? If anybody wants to shift from being reactive to proactive, the first thing they need to do is pause and think. How many times, you know, people don't have time to think. So when you run a company, you have meetings for the company with an agenda, with a mission statement, with tracking down, you know, goals and performance. But you don't do that for yourself.

5:15Right. You never you just go on from one thing to another. And so you're reactive. Right. So to shift from reactive to proactive, first you stop, you reflect, you think, and then you shift. You mentioned, though, in the whole burnout, the overwhelm thing, that stress factor. I know that's something that you're big and you care a lot about. How do people move through that? And what's the process of that one? One angle is your own burnout. The other one is other people's burnout, right? So in terms of your own burnout, the most dangerous thing about burnout is that most people, when they're burned out, they're too burned out to realize that they're burned out because they just go on from one thing to another and they try to make it and get through the day.

5:54If we're talking about success and the heart of all success is good decision making, good mindful decision making in different aspects of your life then how are you going to do that if you're so burned out that you're not even thinking right so for yourself the most important thing is self-care self-care self-care and assume that you're burned out after the last two and a half years everybody's burned out when somebody else is burned out and you're dealing with them believe me brad they're not nice it's like they're going to be the most obnoxious people They're going to be like passive aggressive and horrible.

6:27And so we don't know why the other person is like that. So if that happens to you and you encounter that kind of person, for the love of God, be patient. You know, be patient with people these days because you don't know what the other person is going through. What are some of the keys to getting people to that massive level of success, going from good to great type thing? Going from good to great to me is harder than going from not so good to good. That's a lot of effort. That's a becoming process where you grow as a person to someone who is great. I think the heart of it is really challenging yourself all the time and having a good reason to do that.

7:02In the short term, you lose the comfort. You're constantly challenged. You're never comfortable. I'm literally talking about myself, Brad. But in the long run, you really, really reap the fruit of your efforts. You got to have a really, really good reason to get up in the morning and do all of that. And it's got to be greater than yourself. I mentioned my family. As far as I'm concerned, for some people, it's another goal. It's got to be something that is above the daily grind that is going to make you go through the daily grind to get there. Hi, and thanks for joining us on the Big Success Podcast.

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