Up until a few days ago, reading the John P. Kotter, Leading Change,  book has been difficult for me, I am a health care practitioner (HCP), I view people’s health and well being as overriding any other concerns, especially financial and business concerns.  This book on leading change has definitely stirred up some strong emotions in me, frustration and anger mostly.  I can easily imagine the employees’ stress levels increasing as they are being manipulated to produce more for the company. 

As any HCP will tell you, stress is a strong determinant of health, I see it in my clinic everyday, people coming in to see me in pain, unable to function, unable to manage their stress levels anymore.  They tell me their stories, quite often work is the main stressor and cause for their discomfort and pain.   As I read this book, I see my patients, I hear their stories, and I get frustrated. 

Monday, a thought came to me, many of my patients are trying hard to change their lives, most often they want to loose weight, start to exercise more, eat better, enjoy more time with their families and decrease their stress levels.  The majority of the time, they fail at this change of lifestyle and revert back to their old and comfortable habits, however detrimental they may be.  That is when my relationship to this book changed, I finally was able to see past the business applications and understand how this information could be applied to my clinical practice and my teaching.

As an instructor at Langara College, I deal with students constantly being pushed towards change, some can navigate these waters quite gracefully, others go kicking and screaming for the full two years of our program.  

A few weeks ago, I was at a PD day through Langara College, our teachers for this workshop showed us a chart that we could use to understand why some of our students can have such a difficult time and go through an emotional roller coaster while in our classes.  I had forgotten about this chart until our class on Saturday January 28^th where our teacher had a slide showing the emotional reactions to mismanaged change, it was titled “What can possibly go wrong?”. 

The following chart is the one that was given to our group at the PD day, it speaks of 5 necessities to be able to manage complex change effectively.  It also shows what emotions can arise in a person lacking one of those necessities and therefore becoming a hinderance to successfully managing change.  

I now feel I can use the information from Kotter’s book, your slides and this chart to help guide my students and clients through their changing lives.   Helping them see which of the eight-stage process of creating major change they are having difficulty with, maybe their vision is unclear, or they are lacking the necessary skills, or maybe they need short-term wins to maintain their motivation.   A common thread I see with my patients is that they do not incorporate the newly formed habits in their lives fully, they are not part of who they now are, therefore it is not uncommon to see them revert back to old detrimental habits after a short period of success. 

I also really appreciated your explanation of the Johari Window.  A complexity of working as a HCP is dealing with the “unknown” aspect of our patients, that part of them that is also unknown to them yet has a great impact on their health and healing abilities.  I spend a great deal of time trying to explain this concept to my students and how it is crucial to have a good grasp of the fact that most of our patient’s issues will be unaccessible to us yet they will greatly affect our abilities to help the patient.  I have taken the time to draw the Johari Window on the class board this week and went through it with my students, I found it very helpful to bring this concept to life for my students. 

So all in all, I am now aware that I was going through this book kicking and screaming, refusing to accept the information and visualizing how I could incorporate it in my practice.  I was resistant to the change, I had no vision, no incentives and no plan.  Somehow, this past Monday it all changed for me, and I am glad for it.