Find Your Reason To Change

How to determine your why

Change is hard. It’s often so difficult that change maintained is referred to as transformation. Significant change can be life-altering. This is why we need a compelling reason for most change.

Without a compelling reason, most change is either avoided or will not be maintained once the moment’s urgency is gone.

When you find your reason to change, you will find the key that unlocks what you and your team will need to gather the courage, resources, and sustaining efforts required. Without a compelling reason for the change, change is doubtful.

Lesson to Learn

Why you must change is the first step in accomplishing real tricky transformations. We all need to spend time understanding what compels our organization to change or us.

This is time well spent to look deeply at the underlying circumstances, the environment we operate in, and the ability to follow through once we make the decision.

Fully understanding and communicating the reason for change will set the tone for any effort undertaken.

The reason must be overwhelmingly compelling. It must resonate at an emotional, intellectual, and personal level. It needs to inspire us, and we must see it without reservation.

When this level of “why” is determined, it can lead to incredible results beyond what was once imagined.

Answer for Me

I have learned the hard way not to skip going deeply into the reason for the change. This is true at a personal, team, organizational, and community level. Spending time developing the rationale for change is well worth the time. Rushing this stage can doom the effort before it is given a chance.

When it involves more than my own life and decisions, even more time must be spent cultivating others’ feelings and thinking. If it’s a small team, individual conversations are necessary. Larger groups require formal and informal leaders to be brought into the process to determine the reason for the change.

The pandemic was a compelling reason for change on so many levels of my personal and professional life.

This kind of motivation will not be evident in all cases. However, finding a compelling reason for the change is no less necessary. Lessons learn around successful changes during this crisis can offer insights into what moves us, our families, our teams, and our community.

When we have to change, we can do so quickly and effectively. When I find an overwhelming straightforward reason that moves many people, the change effort usually succeeds.

Learning to see when change is needed, and possible can be a defining leadership trait for all of us.

Action

Stop to determine the reason for the change before you begin. Please do not rush this stage because it is critical to your overall success.

Spend time reflecting on it and bring into your discernment trusted advisors. Sort through all the angles and look for the rational and emotional impacts that compel action.

If it moves you and trusted advisors to act, you have probably found the reason you need to move quickly forward.

Take the time to prepare the grounds for the change. Test it with others. Does it move them to want to act? If not, step back and reformulate the rationale until it elicits a deep level of commitment, which will be needed for rapid and meaningful change. Too often, this step is rushed, don’t make this mistake.

Daily Actions

Be on the lookout for change during your day-to-day activities. What causes you to want to change practices, approaches, or organizational offerings? If it keeps you up at night, it is usually a good sign that meaningful change is needed.

Go with this feeling to develop the rationale for change. Use your regular daily interactions to work out the reasons for the change.

Make transformations a part of your life, so you know how to change once you find that compelling reason.

You have been involved with lots of changes before. Use these prior learnings to inform the process of identifying the change and the reason for this change.

Daily actions will be necessary for any lasting change. Test your ideas within the context of what would need to be done daily to implement the change.

Find your compelling reason, develop its expression, and get started on creating a future better than today.

To learn more about leadership, visit me at www.macny.org.

To get a copy of my book Present-Future Leader, go to www.amazon.com.