Dr. Cloud continues in Necessary Endings by discussing how to know when to let go of people as this can often be the hardest ending. He says a way to understand this is to diagnose the character of the people. He says that there are three kinds of people and you need to deal with each kind differently:

• Wise people - a person who can learn from his own experience or the experience of another, make that part of himself and then deliver results from that experience base. They adjust to the truth and you deal with them by talking to and giving them feedback.
  
• Foolish people - a person who rejects feedback, resists it, explains it away, and does nothing to adjust to meet its requirements. They adjust the truth so they don’t have to do anything different so talking to them about the problem does not help but setting limits and consequences does. Making the foolish person feel consequences is the biggest way to help influence their change.
  
• Evil people - a person who wants to hurt you intentionally and the way to deal with them is to step away and protect yourself.
  

Dr. Cloud says the way to make a change is to create urgency and this can be done with time and energy. He says there are few strategies to create urgency:

• Make the threat to our future as real in our minds as it is in reality
  
• Create “Ending Alliances” - form powerful coalitions of those people who will be influencers of change
  
• Create vision - this helps to create the motivation to change
  
• Set deadlines - force endings by a certain timeframe
  
• Create structure - consisting of time, plans, critical paths, milestones, deadlines, and meetings.
  
• Stay close to the misery - to keep giving you the incentive to change
  
• Measure, measure, measure - to make sure progress is made
  

Doing these steps helps to make urgent the new normal.  What are you doing to ensure that you are assessing whether the people you are working with are the right ones? Are you creating enough urgency to create the changes that you desire. What is one step above that you can implement in order to begin to make the change?

Dr. Cloud continues his discussion in Necessary Endings by describing the the state of being stuck or when we are not able to make endings a natural process. He says that creating an ending may cause some hurt, but it is good pain because it gets you to a whole other level. It can be bad, however, when we get used to the pain and it becomes our new normal. Pain is a signal that something is wrong and action is required. Dr. Cloud suggests that people stay in this pain when they are taking actions of learned helplessness based upon their internal maps. 

He says that there are five types of internal maps:

• Having an abnormally high pain threshold - putting up with too much “stuckness”
  
• Covering for others - taking on too much responsibility for others
  
• Believing that ending it means I failed - feeling like you need to persevere through everything
  
• Misunderstood loyalty - still feeling loyal to someone even when you have outgrown them
  
• •Codependent mapping - feeling responsible for another person’s pain when the enabling is ended.
  

Our psychological mapping can influence the way we handle things especially endings.  If you have one of these mappings Dr. Cloud says that we can grow past these internal mappings by getting in touch with reality. It is often through the awareness of hopelessness which finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment.

The first step he says that will motivate you to do what is necessary is recognizing that what you are doing has no hope of getting what you want. So hopelessness gets us near to a place of fearlessness and out of the place of just wishing things would change, but still doing the same thing (e.g. - the definition of insanity).

So how do you know if you are just wishing for something or that there is real hope that it will change? Dr. Cloud says the past is the best predictor. So how do you know if you can trust someone? Again he says focus on what they have done in the past and that will let you know about their integrity and character. But know that they can change if they are involved in a change process, have some structure around that change process (e.g. - coach, mentor, seminar), have some way to monitor these changes, support, and some success. Finally there also has to be some energy to change.

So are you facing your reality right now? Are you seeing things as they truly are or are you still seeing them out of a glass of hope? If so what internal mappings are you holding on to? What sorts of things will help you to internalize the change and want to move on?

The last part of Switch by brothers Chip and Dan Heath discusses “shaping the path” of change in your organization, business, or life. Shaping the path means creating an environment that encourages change or providing a method by which change can happen.

In Switch the authors describe three ways to shape the path - tweak the environment, build habits, and rally the herd. In tweaking the environment the thought is making the journey easier. What is in the environment, culture, way of working that is making a change hard? One example is making buying books from Amazon easy by having the 1-Click system. All of your information is stored in their database so when you want to buy something you just click once and it is done. Tweaking the environment is about making the right behavior easier and the wrong behavior harder.

The second way is building habits. Habits change over time, but by visualizing doing new actions (or developing action triggers) at a certain time can help shift a habit as well as creating a checklist. Anything that reminds a person to shift an automatic behavior into a new one can help in building sustainable new habits.

Finally the third tool is rallying the herd. This means that change happens when there support and help along the way .  It is emulating behavior that others close to you are doing. So if you can get a small group to start exhibiting the change they can impact the rest of the organization. 

While these are all interesting ways to encourage change I believe that the Heath brother’s perspective on this process simplifies what it takes to really change. They provide great examples of how things can change and what it takes, but the real process of change happens in the practice of it, through the growing pains of it, and with the support and help of people who have already been through a similar process.

When have you had wins in implementing change in your organization? What did you do to encourage the change and make it so that it is accepted and implemented throughout your organization? What can you do today to begin shaping the path of change?

The next part of “Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip and Dan Heath talks about the second component of making change happen in your organization, business, or life - motivating your Elephant.

The Elephant again is the emotional mind. It is one that is in touch with our feelings and emotions associated with the change. Oftentimes people are scared of the change - scared that they are not capable of achieving the change, withstanding the change, or making the change. So in order to truly motivate people the Heath brothers state that you need to make people believe they are capable of change by either “shrinking the change” or “growing the people.”

So how do you shrink the change? Well Strike says that you limit the investment that you ask for up front or you limit the amount of time that you ask for. Either way you are breaking up the change into bite size pieces so that you are providing small wins and therefore hope each time a small task is completed. As each step along the process is completed then your confidence builds that you can make the change happen and therefore your Elephant is growing.

The second way that you can help people believe that they are capable of change is to “grow the people.” That means that you can help people tie the change to a sense of pride, their identity or a vision of a better situation. As a result they have something that is guiding them towards a change and encouraging them to want to grow. It is shift in mindset to show them a vision of a better future and the benefits of that future. 

So in your organization how are you motivating your Elephant and those of your employees? Can you find ways to “shrink the change” or “grow the people” so that they are motivated to change or is their Elephant getting in the way?

This is a review of the first part of “Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. This book describes three major ways to make change happen in any part of your business, organization, or life. They describe the three methods - as directing the Rider (your rational mind), motivating the Elephant (your emotions), and shaping the path (providing guidance on how to get there).

This post will focus on the directing the Rider. The Rider is the rational mind and can often get stuck in “analysis paralysis” when a change is occurring. The Rider might not know how to change or what to do or it could be exhausted from trying so hard to change (and moving past the emotional Elephant) that it loses steam. The rational mind can also get stuck in choosing the short term gain versus the longer term view of things (e.g. - eating chocolate now or losing weight in the long term).

So what do Chip Heath and Dan Heath say about directing the Rider? They say first that you need to find some bright spots or positive examples of when this change has successfully happened in the past. For example when have you been able to implement a successful process or technology change? What were the key components of making that successful? The Heath brothers argue that if you or someone in your organization has been able to do it before then you can do it again. It is like Tony Robbins always says: “Success leaves signs.”

The second way that Chip and Dan Heath say that you can direct the Rider is to give it direction. They say that the best way to get of the analysis of the mind is to envision a future where the change already exists. Lay it that vision in detail and know what that long term looks like and feels like. Then they say to script out the critical moves to get there. If the new vision is a new process change then script out what the old process is, what the new process could be, the gaps, and then first 5-10 ten steps on how to achieve that new process. Then your employees will know exactly what to do in bite size pieces so that they can start to make the change without the rational mind getting in the way.

So what bright spots can you identify in your organization to help you with your current change process? Or what vision are you trying to achieve in your life? And how can you map out the critical steps that you can use to start getting there today?