131 - Change From The Inside Out

In this episode, Erika Andersen says avoiding change has been a historical imperative. In her book, Change From The Inside Out, Erika shows how we can overcome that reluctance and get good at making necessary change by laying out a five-step model for addressing both this human side of change and its practical aspects.

Erika  is the founding partner of Proteus, a coaching, consulting, and training firm that focuses on leader readiness. Over the past 30 years, Erika has developed a reputation for creating approaches to learning and business-building that are tailored to her clients’ challenges, goals, and culture. She and her colleagues at Proteus focus uniquely on helping leaders at all levels get ready and stay ready to meet whatever the future might bring. Much of her recent work has focused on organizational visioning and strategy, executive coaching, and management and leadership development. 

To learn more, visit https://proteus-international.com/

In this episode we cover:

1:59   Change Defined
4:18   Human History
9:27   The Change Arc
15:08 Mental Shift
18:20 Our Internal Monologue
21:58 Change Levers
27:54 Becoming Change Capable
29:42 Group Effort

Thanks so much for tuning in again this week. I appreciate you  🙂

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Special thanks to Erika Andersen for being on the show.

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Chapters

• 1:59 Change Defined
• 4:18 Human History
• 9:27 The Change Arc
• 15:08 Mental Shift
• 18:20 Our Internal Monologue
• 21:58 Change Levers
• 27:54 Becoming Change Capable
• 29:42 Group Effort

Transcript

Did You Know  0:02  
Did you know that if you avoid trying new or unusual things, you'll never get to enjoy the best parts of life?

Intro  0:09  
 Hello, action taker! Welcome to Live Blissed Out. A podcast where I have inspirational and informational conversations with business owners and subject matter experts that help you get the scoop on a variety of topics. Tired of hesitating or making decisions without having the big picture? Wanna be in the know? Then this is the place to go. I'm your host Marisa Huston. Helping you achieve bliss through awareness and action. So let's get to it. In this episode, Erika Anderson says avoiding change has been a historical imperative. In her book, Change From The Inside Out, Erika shows how we can overcome that reluctance and get good at making necessary change by laying out a five step model for addressing both this human side of change and its practical aspects. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a coaching, consulting and training firm that focuses on leader readiness. Over the past 30 years, Erika has developed a reputation for creating approaches to learning and business building that are tailored to her clients challenges, goals and culture. She and her colleagues at Proteus focus uniquely on helping leaders at all levels, get ready and stay ready to meet whatever the future might bring. Much of her recent work has focused on organizational visioning and strategy, executive coaching, and management and leadership development. To learn more, visit www.proteus-international.com. 

Disclaimer  1:33  
The information opinions and recommendations presented in this podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this podcast is done at your own risk. This podcast should not be considered professional advice. 

Marisa Huston  1:45  
Welcome to the show, Erika.

Erika Andersen  1:47  
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

Marisa Huston  1:50  
I'm thrilled to have you. I appreciate you being here. This would be a good time for you to share with our listeners, what we are talking about today and why it matters. 

Erika Andersen  1:59  
We're talking about change. And I think there's probably hardly anyone in the world after the past couple of years who doesn't think that change is important. I just wrote this book called Change From The Inside Out. This is the fifth book I've written. And when I write a book, it's always because I get curious about some things. My colleagues and I at Proteus have had a change practice for over a decade and I noticed that even as we were helping organizations with change, two things kept happening. And one is, I noticed over and over and over again, that people don't like change. That for most people change is hard and the more change there is, the harder it gets. And I got very curious about that. It's why is change so hard for us? And then the other thing I got curious about is when an individual person goes through a change, what actually happens emotionally and psychologically? And I felt like if I could get clearer about those two things, it would be very helpful for people. That was the genesis of this book. And that's primarily what I'd love to talk about to your listeners today.

Marisa Huston  3:00  
You know, I love what you just said here. And it's really important that we identify what change is to people. For example, our lives in general, right, Erika? We change all the time. It's just that sometimes we don't recognize it. Let's say you graduate from high school, and you decide you want to either get a job or start college or do whatever, that's change. You decide to get married, and you and your partner then decide you want children and you have a new baby that's change. You move to a new neighborhood, that's change. And yet, a lot of these changes are perceived as positive. We get excited about some of these things, because they mean new adventures, and the ability to try new things and perhaps reap rewards that we weren't able to achieve before. However, it seems like a lot of the changes that are required, let's say in business, or even in today's world, the things that we've been experiencing things like food shortages, or inflation, these changes scare people, and they're perceived as negative. They're stressed because they're going where are we going back to the new normal? I liked it the way before where I could buy whatever I wanted, I could afford things. And now I'm in a different situation. How do we distinguish that? Because it's not necessarily change that scaring people, but it's the kind of change that scares them. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Erika Andersen  4:18  
I love that distinction. I think it's an important one. So let me take you and your listeners through what I went through as I was trying to answer the same question. So I thought about, okay, so change, especially of the kind you're talking about change that it's imposed upon us, that's unexpected. It's hard for us. I always think about history because it is where we all arose from. And so I thought about any human being anywhere in the world 100 or 200 or 500 years ago. Let's say someone in the United States 200 years ago, that person's life would have been unimaginably stable to us. Generally speaking, the only kinds of changes that would happen in that person's life are the kind you talked about. They get married, they have a child, their parents died. What I think of this kind of predictable human timeless changes. But other than that, think about it, 200 years ago, someone's life from beginning to end, they almost certainly would have done the work their parents did, gone to the same church, eaten the same food, lived in the same place for their whole life, that person's life all through the history of humanity would have been to us remarkably stable. And when a big change, an outside change came, it was almost always a threat and a danger. It was a famine, or a flood or a war or a plague. And so, throughout human history, we came to think of unexpected changes as bad, as dangerous and negative and threatening. And that the best bet almost always was to come back to that previous known. So I'd say up until the last maybe 80 years, 100 years, that kind of homeostatic predisposition to come back to that previous known, which includes, you know, birth and death and children, but not all this outside stuff. So to come back to that previous stable known, that's what we're wired to want, and to expect. So now here we are in the 21st century, and over the last 50, or 60 years, change has just speeded up so fast. At the beginning of my book of Change From The Inside Out, I talked about when I was a little kid. And when we were three years old, we got our first television, a lot of people in the United States were getting their first televisions. And then it wasn't until 10 years later, that we got our first color TV. So sixty or seventy years ago, that was the pace of change. There was an invention and then 10 years later, another big innovation. And now that level of innovation happens every 45 minutes on our phone when we get a new app. So even over this last 50 or 60 years, the pace of externally imposed change has just sped up. So here we are, human beings, still wired to expect that change is dangerous and threatening. So no wonder when change comes we find it disorienting and scary. 

Marisa Huston  7:06  
So it sounds to me if I understand you correctly, two factors that you mentioned are, the speed at which change happens is very different from the way it used to be. Even in our generation. Technology has changed so much that literally you could buy a phone now and in a year, it's obsolete, because the next phone has something totally different. And then the other piece of it, there's a difference between change that we have control over, versus the changes that happen around us that we feel disconnected with or feel like we can't do anything about and it's not going in the direction we want, so then we fear it.

Erika Andersen  7:41  
Precisely change that's imposed upon us. Which if you're in a business, if you're in a society, the changes are just like coming at you, right? And that's scary to people.

Marisa Huston  7:50  
It's so much more fun when you make a choice to do something because you know, it's something that you want, and you're comfortable with that decision. But when you go to the grocery store now and you have a favorite little cracker that you'd like to buy, and now that's no longer there, that's scary to you. Because even though it may sound like it's not an important thing, it's comfort to you. It's something you've always had since you were a kid. You love that. And now this is the first time you've ever gone and it's not there. And then you're wondering, will it ever come back?

Erika Andersen  8:19  
Exactly. And that is cumulative. There are now in our daily lives, dozens of those little things, what happened that crack or what happened to that person? What happened in that job? What happened to the way my business is set up? At the same time that big things are happening. Inflation and wars and pandemics. You know so we're overwhelmed by the quantity of change that is being imposed upon us, you know that we don't have control over. And you're saying it exactly correctly. When I understood that, then I went to the second thing of like, well, how can we rewire ourselves? How can we help ourselves get better at moving through change? The subtitle of my book is making you your team and your organization more change capable. So how can we become more change capable? In this new era we live in change is not going to somehow magically get less. So if this is the situation we're in, if this is the kind of environment we're in of continuous change, how do we get better at it? That's when I went to this idea of what actually happens when we go through change. Because if we become aware of that, then we can take action to get better at going through change.

Marisa Huston  9:22  
And I would love to know and I think our listeners would love to know because we're feeling it, but we don't understand it.

Erika Andersen  9:27  
Yes, or what to do about it. And I know that a lot of your listeners are helpers of other people, coaches entrepreneurs, so it's both putting on your unmask before attempting to help others. It's both getting better ourselves at going through change so that we can help others go through change too. What I'd love to share with you and your listeners is what we came to call the change arc, which is the movement of an individual person through a specific change. And here's what we found out how it works. I love this so much I find it useful every day. The first thing we found in this arc is what we call proposed change. That when a change comes at you, almost without exception, people, any individual wants to know three things about that change. This is remarkably predictable. People want to know, what does this mean for me? Literally, what am I going to have to do differently as a result of this change? Then they want to know, why is it happening? Because we prefer the status quo for the most part, and the change is being imposed upon us, it's like, give me a good reason helped me understand why it's important for me to make this shift. And then the third thing we want to know is, what will it look like after the change has been made? And what I discovered when I was researching this is that a lot of psychologists now believe that our deepest fear is fear of the unknown. And that really makes sense, given everything we said. If we want to go back to this known, then the unknown is scary. So the third thing we want is to have that question answered. What's going to happen post this change? What does the future look like once this change has been made? So people start asking those questions. And it's so interesting, because often people who are creating the change, they hear those questions, and they take them as resistance, but they're not. It's just people really wanting to understand what the change is, so they can get their arms around it. So what does it mean for me? Why is it happening? What will it look like when it's done? Then you go up this arc, and then it comes to the heart of this whole thing, which is our mindset about change. So it turns out that even as we're beginning to ask these questions, we generally have a negative mindset about this change that's coming at us. So this is our mental set, right? We assume that the change is going to be difficult, and costly, and weird. And difficult means I don't know how to do it, this is I'm going to be asked to do things I don't know how to do, and other people will make it hard, there will be obstacles. Costly means I believe it will take for me things I value. So it could be simple things like time and money. But it's more likely that we're going to assume that this change that's coming at us is going to take away really intrinsic things like my identity, or my reputation, or my freedom or my relationships or my power. We think it's going to take away things that are really valuable to us. We just make that assumption. And then weird means strange. This is not how I do things. This is not how we do things around here. I was so excited in a weird way when I figure this out. Because it's like, well, of course, it's awful if we assume these things about it, right? And we have these negative assumptions. And so we even listen to the answers to those questions. So then what we noticed is that when someone actually does decide to make a change, it's rarely because external circumstances change, it's almost always because their mindset shifts, and they start to think or to be helped to think that the change couldn't be easy, or at least doable, rather than difficult, that it could be more rewarding than it is costly. It could give them more than it takes away. And that it could be normal. And normal means you know, other people like me do this. And people I admire and want to emulate do this, which is why it's so important for leaders to model a change. We look to see is it normal? Is my boss doing it? We noticed that once people start to believe it's just a mindset shift that, oh, I can see how this change could be easy, or at least doable, rewarding and normal, then they start to be willing to learn and do the new behaviors, the new things that the change requires and the change can occur. So we realized that the heart and soul of any change, individual or organizational is helping as many people as possible to have those initial proposed change questions answered and to make that mindset shift, which is so exciting, because that's entirely within our control.

Marisa Huston  13:52  
As I was listening to what you were saying, a few words come to my head. So you were talking about we anticipate that change is going to be a bad thing initially. And it's primarily because we think of loss. When something changes, you have to learn something new generally, whether it's you live in a new town, and now you have to learn how to get around, like where's my favorite restaurant going to be? Or the closest doctor or whatever it is that matters to me, I need to relearn. And when you're relearning, there's always going to be an element of failure. Failure is part of growth. You cannot grow without making mistakes. And then you learn from those mistakes. But it's difficult to do. And so in our minds were going, oh but I was so comfortable where I was, if we use that as an example, right? I knew my neighborhood, I had my friends, I knew everything. And now I feel like I'm starting from scratch. And that is why people initially fight it. But now if we take that example and say, okay, now you've done it, and you're uncomfortable, but then all of a sudden you realize, you know what? This turned out to be better than where I was living. I like the kind of people here, I have a better job, the weather is better, you know, whatever the situation may be. Now they start to say, goodness me, why didn't I do this sooner? Doesn't that happen?

Erika Andersen  15:08  
Marisa, that's such a good example, because you're describing that mental shift. And some people never make the shift and so they're never comfortable in the new situation and some people make that shift. I'll tell you what I mean. So let's say there are two people who are living in Colorado and they decide to move to Philadelphia. They both start out focusing on what's going to be difficult, costly and weird about that. Oh, my gosh, I'm not going to know anybody, and I'm going to feel uncomfortable, I'm going to lose my friends. And they both start by focusing on those difficult, costly, weird aspects of the move. Let's say then, however, that one of those people, either because they've become change capable on their own recognizance, or somebody is helping them, they start to think about, well, how could I make it easier for myself? Well, if I'm worried about losing friends, maybe I should join some clubs of people who like things I like. Okay, I could do that. That would make it easier, and it would make it more rewarding. And they start asking themselves, how can I make it easier? How can I make it more rewarding? How can I make it more normal? And then they know when they do and they acknowledge and they celebrate that, just exactly as you said. You know, there's a lot of new things here and I really like this and then the other. And maybe person one doesn't do that. They just stay stuck in difficult, costly, weird. Boy, I just don't like Philadelphia, as well as Colorado because I lost my friends and it's hard to get around. And their situations aren't any different. They're both new people in Philadelphia, but one person is making that mindset shift, and the other person isn't. And I use that example, because it's such a great example of how much of this goes on inside our own heads. It's how we decide and we can decide to respond to a change.

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Marisa Huston  16:55  
When you say mindset shift, does that mean you have to search for the good? It's so easy to complain about what you don't like. But if you're really actively looking for all the good things, and in fact, a lot of people who do that maybe reflect in a journal every night and say, what are all the great things that happened to me today, instead of focusing on the things they don't like, that in itself helps you overcome. Is that what you're referring to when you say mindset shift?

Erika Andersen  17:59  
So, that's the outcome of the mindset shift. Let's unpack that one level down. What we mean by mindset shift is the determination just to speak to yourself differently. So how we think is basically centered in how we talk to ourselves about things. You know, we all talk to ourselves about things, right? 

Marisa Huston  18:19  
We all do. 

Erika Andersen  18:20  
And we do it all the time. And a lot of it is just it's our internal monologue is running all the time and a lot of it is pretty inconsequential, kind of and banal. I mean, oh, I like oranges, oh, nice day, oh, my shoes hurt, you know, whatever. We're just saying things for ourselves all the time. But then there are things that we say to ourselves that are unhelpful. And that's what we're talking about. Saying to yourself that a necessary and inevitable change, continuing to tell yourself that it's going to be difficult, costly and weird. What I'm saying to be very specific, and very action oriented is, you can control your self talk. You can speak differently to yourself. So for instance, if you're in the midst of a change, and you find yourself saying, oh, my gosh, this is going to be so hard, I'm not going to be able to do this. You hear that thought in your mind. Then you, I, we all have the power to stop and go wait, we wait, hold up. How do I know I'm not going to be able to do this? How can I make this easier for myself and speak to yourself differently? Not even necessarily positively, but more hopefully and more accurately? How can I make this easier for myself? How could this be rewarding? And then look to answer those questions that will send your mind in the right direction. Does that make sense? 

Marisa Huston  19:34  
So it's almost like self coaching yourself? But you can't do that without being aware that you're even doing it to begin with. So when that stuff surfaces, you have to be aware and catch it and then ask yourself the question so you can kind of flip it on its head.

Erika Andersen  19:47  
That is exactly right. When we teach people to manage their self talk, it's alliterative so you can remember it, we say just exactly what you just said, recognize what you're saying to yourself that's not serving you. Then record. One of the things we recommend is that you write it down. If you're saying something negative to yourself unhelpful, you know about change, especially being difficult costly and weird. Because if you write it down, it kind of separates you from it. You can see it more clearly. A lot of times when I write down something unhelpful, that I'm saying to myself, I look at it and go, oh, my gosh, I'm saying that to myself? That's not true. And for once you've written it down, then you can revise it. You can say, okay, what do I want to say myself, that's going to be more hopeful, more accurate, that's going to send me in the direction of change capability? And then you just repeat that. Because we have these little negative mantras we say to ourselves, and so next time you say yourself, oh, I don't know.  Hold up, hold up. I can learn how to do this. How do I learn how to do this?

Marisa Huston  20:39  
We tend to generalize based on what we see around us. So for example, you could be driving and somebody cuts you off. And so the first thing that comes to your mind is all people are terrible. They're just terrible. They're rude. I don't understand this world. You know, this and that. And you just get all upset. Two seconds later, you could be making a right turn and somebody lets you through, or there's a line and they smile at you or whatever, 

Erika Andersen  21:01  
Precisely, 

Marisa Huston  21:02  
And then all of a sudden, it's like, you know, they're not so terrible after all right? Yeah.

Erika Andersen  21:06  
Exactly. Marisa. So when you say something global and negative, like that, about change. God, I hate change. It's always bad. Wait, wait, hold up. That's not accurate. It's self coaching. It's exactly what you're saying, oh, wait, wait, wait. I made this change at work. We put a new system last year at work and it worked out really well. I like it better. It saved me a bunch of time. So change is not always bad. You know, you can talk back to yourself.

Marisa Huston  21:28  
In that scenario that you just shared at work, for example, with new software systems. That's like one of the biggest dramas that happens in companies. That's a big deal. And it's because they're not familiar with what they're getting for what they're giving up. Not every time, but I would say majority of the time, they say afterwards, this was a much better system. I can do more, it helps save time. 

Erika Andersen  21:49  
Exactly. 

Marisa Huston  21:50  
But they have to learn it. And because it's a change that they didn't ask for they fight it until they finally realized that it was actually a good decision.

Erika Andersen  21:58  
Exactly right. Since a lot of your listeners are helping professionals, coaches, and entrepreneurs and managers. So the first thing as I said back a few minutes ago is help yourself get better at this at managing your mindset and moving yourself through change, and how you can help the people that you're trying to help get better by going through change. Because what you just said is true. Once a good and positive change is done, then people can go, oh, this wasn't so bad. In fact, it's better, but it's painful and takes a long time to get there. So how can you kind of accelerate that process? We have the what we call change levers, levers in the sense of forced multipliers for things that you can do to help yourself and other people through that change arc so that their mindset shifts. The first thing is give understanding. A lot of times in organizations change happens and people are told almost nothing, they're really kept in the dark. And that makes it infinitely harder. So when a change is going to happen. answer those initial questions. What does this mean for you? Why is it happening? What will it look like when it's done? Just give them as much contextual and relevant information as you can about the change. That really helps.

Marisa Huston  23:05  
That's like be proactive. Anticipate some of the things that you know, they're probably thinking before they even say it so that you can at least show them that you gave that some thought.

Erika Andersen  23:14  
That's exactly right. And if you share that understanding, it automatically makes it seem less scary, less unknown. So then the second one is clarify and reinforce priorities. Because a lot of times when there's a change, because mostly they don't like change, we assume it means everything's going to change. So if you can clarify that, okay, so those four priorities that you had in your job, three of them are going to be exactly the same. The fourth one is changing slightly because of this change. It gives people better context and it's really soothing to know in a change, what's not changing. So clarify and reinforce priorities. And the third one is give control. You made a great distinction at the beginning about the changes that are most difficult for us are the ones where we feel out of control, the ones that are imposed upon us. So whatever you can do in a change, especially in organizational change, to give people as many choices as possible. Part of that is getting their input. How do you think this should happen? And when should we do this? And what do you think your people will need to know? And what do you think are going to be the scariest things about this? So really ask for their input, but also give them choices about when things happen and how they happen and what order they happen in. So whatever you can realistically give people as choices as agency, super, super helpful. And then the last one, and this may be in some ways, the most important but it's certainly foundational, is give support. In the early parts of a change the most important support you can give people is listening to them. It's just listening deeply to their concerns, their hesitations, their fears. Lots of times as leaders and coaches we try to talk people out of their fears about change, and that just feels dismissive. Just take it in. Also, you're concerned about how this is going to affect X or you're worried that you won't know how to do this. Just listen, just take it in. Because what happens, then it's almost magical. When people really feel heard, like you're not trying to reassure or talk them out of or dismiss their fears, when people really feel heard, then they're ready to hear about the more practical support that you're going to offer. Wow, you're worried you won't know how to do this. That's a really legitimate fear and we have a training program, or we have people who are going to come in and show you or we have this workflow outline, and you can look at it and see what questions you have. So once you've really listened to the bottom, kind of with people, then you can offer them practical support to make the change the new skills, the new understanding the new techniques, the new processes and tools and workflows. Does that make sense?

Marisa Huston  25:41  
Not only does that make sense, but it also benefits the company itself. That feedback is things that they likely might have missed. So what happens is a lot of these folks are trying a new software system and then through their experience, as they're playing with it and working with it, they realize there's an important component that was not included in there that they'd like to see. Feeling like they are being heard and being able to share, you know, what if we change this? Or what if we adapt this? Or perhaps we don't need this thing, let's remove it? Making sure that they're being heard, and making the effort to improve the system is invaluable for them and the company.

Erika Andersen  26:16  
Could not agree with you more, it is both emotionally powerful and practically powerful. If your listeners decide to read the book, I outline this five step model that we use when we're doing organizational transformations. It's a way to integrate the practical aspects of a change, while cascading as many people as possible through their own chain chart. So it's both the human side and the practical side. And one of the things we talked about, the last step is called keep the change going. It's exactly what you're saying, We've noticed that any change that you make organizationally, is going to have unintended consequences. There are going to be things that you don't see. Just exactly what you said, when people start using new systems, suddenly, it's like, oh, this thing doesn't work very well. If you have created that mechanism of feedback, you're giving people choices and control in that way, you'll catch that. And you'll be able to make a subsequent change that makes the change better, fixes those unintended consequences, but at the same time really builds engagement, because people will get that they've been a part of that success.

Marisa Huston  27:14  
Yeah, I was just going to say the buy-in is so powerful. 

Erika Andersen  27:18  
Yes, exactly. 

Marisa Huston  27:19  
And I call that actually, continuous improvement. We are constantly improving. I always think life in general, our goal is to grow and be better. And in order to do that, change is inevitable. Every day, we're learning something new or doing something different. It's just so subtle, a lot of times that we don't think about it as change. To your point, what happens is, if you don't clarify exactly what kind of change they're going to expect, in their minds, they're thinking my whole world is falling apart. Everything is happening too fast. They feel that they don't have any control over the situation and then that becomes stressful.

Erika Andersen  27:54  
That's exactly right. And what we've noticed when our term of art is, you know now is becoming change capable, as organizations and the people in them are helped to become more change capable, then they do exactly what you say. The natural state for them begins to become, we'll just keep going, we'll just keep improving, we're never going to quote unquote, go back to normal. This is normal, normal is change. We're just going to keep getting better and better. And it's so much less painful to change in organizations like that, because it's what people have come to expect.

Marisa Huston  28:24  
Yeah, and the other thing is to be reminded that it's not just you, it's the team. We're all doing this together so that we can all achieve the goals that we're setting out to achieve and we can't do that without improving. To improve, you have to change in some way. That's just inevitable. It's just a cycle and to your point there, Erika, it's so important to remember that it is a mindset. And I think it's also a team effort. Because the people that are initiating the change, they need to take all those key elements that you shared into consideration so that the change isn't as scary as it could be. But at the same time that people receiving the change or are on that other side of the coin, they need to understand that change is necessary for everyone to better themselves.

Erika Andersen  29:04  
Yes, and that I love what you said about team, which is why again, the subtitle is making you your team and your organization change capable. What we've noticed is that good leaders of change, understand that, understand that it's viralizing the change in such a way that all the people in teams start going, this is us. We're doing this, we're making this change in order to improve.

Marisa Huston  29:25  
Yeah, and especially when you get them involved. And that's why I love the steps you shared. Because you're reminding them. You and I both know in a lot of these situations, they don't. Management makes all the decisions and they just say this is how it's done and you're either going to like it or you can leave. And that kind of attitude does not inspire people.

Erika Andersen  29:42  
And it works less and less well. Because what we've been noticing is that millennials and Gen Z, all the people who are under 40 who are now the bulk of the workforce, they're just not going to put up with that. They're like no, if you want me to be part of this company, let me be part of this company and let me help. And so looking at change as a group effort and taking the input and creating a good two way communication system is essential if you want the best of those young workers.

Marisa Huston  30:10  
That applies in life to in general, right? Nobody likes to just be told what to do. Everybody likes to talk about things, the pros and cons, how they're feeling or why they think that way. When you belittle their ideas, or make them feel like what they have to say, doesn't matter, that's when you deal with a lot of friction and challenge and discontent.

Erika Andersen  30:29  
100%. And with older workers, it might just be friction and discontent, which is bad enough, but younger workers will walk, they'll leave. 

Marisa Huston  30:37  
Yes.

Erika Andersen  30:38  
You know, so you'll lose those great young workers.

Marisa Huston  30:40  
Because they're not inspired to be there anymore. This isn't what I've signed up for. This was so helpful. Erika. I've learned so much. If we don't talk about it in the way we just did, we overlook certain elements that are not necessarily innate. We don't necessarily think about it, we just act on it instinctually, but not realizing that there are certain elements that we haven't incorporated, which could be the reason why we're challenged.

Erika Andersen  31:03  
Yes, I think that's exactly right, Marisa. And because change has sped up so much in the last 20 or 30 years, especially in this last couple years, it's kind of gotten out ahead of us. So I think it's important for all of us to learn these mental and practical skills for becoming more capable, more fluid, about change.

Marisa Huston  31:20  
These things you shared, you could write them down in a little piece of paper and put them up in your office to remind you so that when you're implementing some sort of change in your organization, you can look back at that and say, did I apply these things?

Erika Andersen  31:32  
Exactly. And just because I love your intention to have practical action for your listeners, one thing that they should know is if they decide to get a copy of Change From The Inside Out, almost every chapter has little activities. This thing that I've talked to you about in this chapter, try it out, apply it to your life, see how it works. Because I'm like you I understand that when we can help each other learn, practically learn how to do new behaviors, that's when things change. 

Marisa Huston  31:58  
Oh, absolutely. Erika. Could you share with our listeners, how they can reach you and learn more about what you offer?

Erika Andersen  32:04  
You can go to my website, which is www.erikaandersen.com. Very simple, but my name is spelled a little oddly e r i k a a n d e r s e n or you can go to my business's website, which is Proteus, www.proteus-international.com. You can find out the clients we work with, what we do to help them, all about our change practice. And on my website, you can find out about my books, about my podcast that I have, and the new book Change From The Inside Out. You can buy on Amazon or any electronic bookstore and I hope that that will be helpful to people.

Marisa Huston  32:37  
Thank you, Erika. I have no doubt it will. I know I learned a lot and I'm just so grateful you were able to spend time with us today.

Erika Andersen  32:43  
Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Outro  32:46  
That's a wrap for this episode of Live Blissed Out. Thanks to Erika Andersen for joining us and thanks for listening. If you have a question or comment for a future episode, all you have to do is go to www.speak pipe.com/lbovm or click the link in the show notes to leave a brief audio message. If you find value in our show, please visit www.liveblissedout.com to reach out subscribe and share on social media. This show is made possible through listeners like you. Thank you. So long for now and remember to keep moving forward!