“Shoulda, coulda, and woulda won’t get it done. In attacking adversity, only a positive attitude, alertness, and regrouping to basics can launch a comeback.”
Pat Riley
Legendary Basketball Coach
Phase 7: Experimentation:
It is in the seventh phase that the individual begins to seriously experiment with new and different behaviours and beliefs. It may be as simple as finding out who your real friends are, or how much your family actually means to you. Think of a heavy drinker who stops and loses all his drinking-buddies! He discovers that what he thought were his true friends were only there to drink. Suddenly he has to behave differently, develop new relationships and try to understand the new “rules of the game”. In this process, there will be both successes and failures and the individual’s belief in his own ability to cope will fluctuate accordingly.
If the individual succeeds in other words if what he tried out worked the way he expected, the new behaviour is repeated and strengthened, if he fails he or she may be back, to an extent, at the first phase and go through all the phases a second time. Think of a person who loses a business and now goes through the process again of building up a second one. Let’s say his second attempt fails at the first try i.e. he cannot get sufficient credit “because of a poor track record.” He will probably be devastated by the news! It takes a lot of courage to pick yourself up and try again.
Phase 8: Realization:
Through the experimentation of the previous phase, the person learns what behaviours work and what doesn’t. This understanding helps the individual build confidence and competence to succeed in the new environment as he/she begins to trust him or herself and others begin to trust him or her as well. Gradually a new comfort zone emerges.
When we start at a new company we are uncomfortable and it takes time before we understand the new culture and expectations. We try different forms of behaviour to see what works and what is acceptable or not and as we find out what works we relax and become comfortable – we feel as if this is our place. The same is true of all change.
Phase 9: Integration:
In this final phase, the individual integrates the change completely and the new attitudes, beliefs, patterns of thinking and behaviour come easily and naturally. The new way becomes the comfort zone. His or her life is in balance and integrated in the sense that it has fallen into a pattern that is effective, efficient and appropriate for the situation that he or she is in.
The Phases and Resilience:
The phases described above are what happen when everything goes well. In the ideal world we will pass seamlessly from one phase into the other and we will integrate easily. In reality this seldom happens. More often than not we get stuck at one or more of these phases and we either remain there or we suffer through to the next phase. When there is a major adversity that we have to face such as loss of a job we can often pin point our experience very clearly. But there are usually a myriad of other smaller adversities that also take place that are so small that we hardly notice them although they run the same course underneath the surface.
For instance; if you have lost your job you want to save money and you decide to use only one car. That means that you have to drop the family off at work and school so that you have the car to go to job interviews etc. The family now has to get used to this new pattern. To them this is an adversity while to you this is trivial as finding a job is your adversity. You find yourself boxed in trying to see as many employers as possible while still being available to pick up the kids from school. Suddenly having the whole morning for interviews appears to be shorter than when you first planned it. Adversity after adversity seems to pile up, and you cannot even begin to understand or manage or sort any of them out.
This model helps us understand what is happening to us. It is useful to think back to adversities that we handled in the past – whether well or poorly- so that we can better understand what happened and use the insight to deal with future adversity.
Let’s look at some of the typical stopping points when we are faced with an adversity.
Denial: – Some people just cannot face the adversity and go into denial. They may refuse to talk about it, ignore what has happened or withdraw. In extreme cases they can develop pathologies to avoid acknowledging the event.
Refusal: – We can refuse the change in many ways. Often employees wait a change out as they have heard it before and experience has taught them that nothing will come of it. This often happens with quality drives or productivity drives or any of the other changes that regularly take place in the company. People cling to their old way of doing things and refuse to adopt new patterns of behaviour.
The Twilight zone: – The twilight zone is one of the most difficult phases to go through as we constantly fluctuate between intellectual understanding and emotional acceptance. We must fluctuate because intellectual understanding is often a precursor to emotional acceptance, but the opposite is also true. Sometimes when we are passionate enough about something we learn what we have to learn in order to understand it rationally. In this twilight zone it is easy to jump back to ‘Refusal’ in order to get away from the uncertainty and anxiety. We have to suffer through being in limbo until we can accept emotionally what has happened and how it will affect us.
Emotional Acceptance: – There is no easy way to change emotionally. It takes time, introspection, discussing it with other people and sometimes even professional help before we can reach the stage of acceptance. This is often called a crisis because it is something that we have to discard and something new that we have to fit. We can get stuck in this process, not wiling to let go and not willing to embrace the present.
Experimentation:- In experimentation we may not be able to get it right and forever be in the process of trying something new. The situation may be very difficult. For example, adapting to life in a different country and culture.
Summary
This is just some of the stopping places along the way, there are others and we will discuss them in future posts. Go through the last three posts again to get an overview of the model and take a situation that you have experienced and work through it phase by phase. Remember that positive change goes through the same phases as adverse change, you can use either a positive or a negative experience for this analysis.
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