How to communicate a change

Have you ever been in the situation of finding someone related to you such as a friend, family member, colleague or employee who just found out about a change that will affect them and they are totally shocked because they didn't know what would happen? It is a very common situation and if you reflect a little, you will find many examples around you.

The fact is that in a large number of situations of change we do not invest enough time in communicating what is going to happen, with the consequence of stressing others when they are surprised and are not prepared for the change that is coming. Before that can happen, we need to go through certain formal or informal communication steps during the time the change is in progress.

There is a visual way to look at these steps, and I recommend that you try to use them as much as possible, regardless of whether it's for your personal or work environment.

This model is called Communication Spiral and it begins by creating awareness that something is to come, commenting and announcing in different situations and moments that something new, a new idea, a new innovation is coming soon.

For example, in this case, if you are the innovator who has taken the initiative and takes this awareness communication to your associates and thus capture the first interested parties who will be with you. For that, it is important to invest in communication that generates interest, communicate the tests you are doing with the early adopters and the pilot groups, so that later more adopters will come and engage with you too. This will help the stragglers to arrive.

A typical example is communication of strategies at work, many leaders avoid these important steps and the result is poor strategy implementation where people get confused or not motivated enough due to lack of communication. Some other leaders put a lot of effort into communicating widely at first but then lose focus in the "maintenance" phase and the intentions of the strategies fade along the way.

In order to communicate better, it is important that you develop your empathic skills as well as your listening skills. I can say that Mindful Meditation is a great tool to help you develop them.

You can communicate better thanks to practicing Conscious Meditation because it gives you:

1. Greater emotional intelligence and resilience. Simply put, meditation helps you let go and recover from negative emotions at a much faster rate.

2. Reduced reactivity.

3. Greater empathy.

4. Improved self-awareness.

There are many meditations that we can use to practice and obtain these important benefits. One of them is the practice to identify in which part of the brain lateral thinking enters, and you can do it by following the steps below:

1. Sit in a meditative posture or just in a chair.

2. Close your eyes.

3. Inhale deeply through the nose and exhale through the mouth, repeat this 2-3 times.

4. Take a slow full body scan, focusing on each part of your body, from head to toe.

5. Just put your attention and focus in the middle between your eyes and just wait.

6. Try to observe the moment and the place in your brain where a thought is coming.

7. Observe the thought without judgment and let it go, focusing again between your eyes.

8. Wait until the new thought arrives and try again to identify where the brain came from.

You can practice this as long and as many times as you want. Remember that the mind is like a muscle that we train daily.

I hope you have enjoyed the post and can encourage you to go forward with your new ideas but always being empathetic so that your team or environment are on board with pleasure!