The Exchanges

Q week to fast track your personal growth so you can meet the ever-increasing demands of the company or companies you are passionately building. Time waits for no one, so let's get started now. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Erica. I appreciate it. Uh, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about what it is you do and how you came to be doing it?

A Well, um, I started my company Proteus in 19 nineties, so 32 years ago. And the reason I started it was that I noticed that as everything started to speed up and flatten out that these skills that in the eighties were called soft skills, you know, leadership, management, teaming, communication became more and more important. And in fact, our original tagline for Proteus was skills for mastering the future. And so I wanted to help people focus on that. And then the other thing I wanted to do, the other reason I started my company is I wanted to be what has come to be called over the years, a business partner at the time, 30 plus years ago, consultancies, especially training companies were like widget sellers. And I really wanted to collaborate. And in fact, our, our mission is, and has always been that we help clients clarify and move toward their hoped for future. And that's true, whether we're doing change work or vision and strategy, or as you say, executive coaching or any number of things, we help leaders be ready for what's coming, be ready for the future and to create the futures they want for themselves.

AI assessment note: “I started my company Proteus in 19 nineties... we help clients clarify and move toward”

Q Sure. So what are some examples of things that you do in order to perpetuate that change within yourself?

A Like for instance, if, if I'm saying to someone, okay, so the way to make ourselves more change capable, better at change is to be able to affect our own mindset about change. Cause one of the things that we found out in our research about change is that most people want to change comes at them. They see it negatively. They see it as dangerous. So our, Opening mindset about change is usually that the change is going to be difficult and costly and weird. And difficult means I don't know how to do it and other people are going to make it hard for me to do. Costly means specifically it's going to take from me things that I value. So it might be time or money, but more likely to be identity or reputation or power or relationships, you know, that this change is going to take this real stuff away from me. And weird just means that's strange. We don't do things like that around here. So what we've learned over the years is that people who are good at change, they're able to change the way they think about change. So that rather than seeing a change initially as difficult, costly, and weird, they immediately started thinking about how it could be easy versus difficult, or at least doable, how it could be more rewarding than costly, how it could be normal, how they could normalize it. So that's work that I've done myself that I do myself on a daily basis. When a change comes at me and I…

AI assessment note: “that's work that I've done myself that I do myself on a daily basis”

Q Okay. Fair enough. You help someone think about how they can change themselves and mostly your clients are executives in companies. How can they then take what you've taught them and teach it to their executive team so that the team can then have it trickle down to the rest of the company?

A Love that question. So in this book that I'm talking about that I just wrote, I talk about why change is hard, and then this change arc, and then I spend most of the book explaining our kind of five-step change model that we use to as a frame for helping organizations go through change, and it's very Swiss Army knife-ish. You can use it to plan a family vacation. You can use it to plan a Organizational transformation for a 100,000 people. But in each of the chapters where I explain the steps, I talk about leaders, individuals, and the organization itself. So we really focus on that. It's like, again, put on your own mask before attempting to help others. But then the main thing, and I could talk about this for hours, but won't the main thing is for leaders to recognize that an individual human being starts going through that change arc. The moment they hear about a change, that's really important. Cause lots of times what happens is leaders, they find out about a change. They think about it for weeks or months. They go through their own arc where they come to see it as doable, rewarding, normal, and then they turn to their folks. And explain the change and expect their people to somehow magically be where they were, where they are now versus where they were three months ago. So we really help them understand, look, now they're starting. They're going to ask all these questions.…

AI assessment note: “the main thing is for leaders to recognize that an individual human being starts going through that change arc”

Q Yeah. So is there anything we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to mention?

A I guess the only thing is I always want to want people to understand that we can rewire ourselves. I mean, this is a, it is a bit of a burning platform. We have to learn how to get good at change, but we can, it's all about, it really is all about mindset and how we think is in our control. So you can change yourself, talk, you can learn to be And, and it's funny. Somebody said to me, I was doing a podcast a couple weeks ago. Somebody said, are you saying people should be positive about change? And it's not that cause some change is bad. Some change is unnecessary. Some changes badly managed. It's just change capable. You want to be able to, and you can rewire yourself to come at any change neutrally. To be able to not automatically think, oh, this is going to be terrible, but just to think, hmm, I wonder what this is going to be. And I wonder if it's something that I need to do. And if you can start neutrally with a change, then, oh man, it's like Tai Chi. It's like starting in a balanced way, you know, then, then you can go through the changes that, that are going to come and that you're going to need to go through. And we can, that's the message. We can do this. We can rewire ourselves.

AI assessment note: “I guess the only thing is I always want to want people to understand”

Q How do you prepare yourself to be capable to help them prepare for the future?

A Oh man. I love that question. So whenever we talk to leaders, we always almost always say that thing they tell you in airplanes, you know, put on your own mask before attempting to help others. And we try to apply that to ourselves. I mean, one of the important things about us, Proteus as a company, and we take it very seriously is practicing what we preach. So for instance, if I'm talking to a leader about having a mindset that prepares you for change, It's important to me that I do that work myself, that I work on my own mindset about change, that I become change capable myself. So we always, I personally, and we, my company feel like the, the best way to help someone get better at something is to get better at it yourself. Does that make sense?

AI assessment note: “the best way to help someone get better at something is to get better at it yourself”

Q slave to the AI, you know, AI overloads. So I was trying to think like desperately, you know, in my early twenties, like, how am I going to position myself to take advantage of this rather than be taken advantage of? And I think I figured it out, but. Like it was not easy for sure. So how do you help leaders actually position themselves to handle this change mindset?

A So let me back up a couple steps and give you some of our thinking around change, which I think will be helpful to your listeners. So I, I told you before we started, I just came out a few months ago, this new book, Change from the Inside Out. And The reason I decided to write the book, as I said, we've, we'd had a change practice for a long time and we really do a good job. I think of integrating the human side and kind of the technical side of change, but I kept seeing people have a hard time with change. And so I really wanted to answer two questions. That's why I started writing the book. And the first question I wanted to answer is why is change so hard for us? Why is it so hard that sometimes people just completely turn away? I'm not going to learn about it. I'm not going to, I'm just going to Create this little place for myself and go over there and do that. You know, so why is it so hard? So that's question one. Second question I wanted to answer was what actually happens when we go through a change? When an individual human being psychologically and emotionally goes through change, what, what happens? And I felt like if I could answer those questions, I would be able to do exactly what you just said, help leaders and anybody really go through change. So here's what I came to about that first question. I looked at history and I realized as I thought about it, that if yo…

AI assessment note: “let me back up a couple steps and give you some of our thinking”