Overcoming the Barrier that Will Prevent Your Success Next Year

Overcoming the Barrier that Will Prevent Your Success Next Year
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You want things to be better in the coming year, right?

If you want them to be better, you will have to do things differently and/or do different things. If you want things to be different, you have to change.

That makes your willingness to do the hard work of actually changing your greatest barrier to success in the coming year.

Let's make an assumption that you are embarking on a change effort with the best of intentions. You don't begin intending to give up or fail. While there are many contributing factors, one that always appears is resistance.

One factor contributing to our reluctance to change is Status Quo Bias - the preference for the familiar over the new. An intriguing study conducted by Felipe De Brigard at Duke University shows the power of this phenomenon and the resistance it creates.

De Brigard's study asked participants to respond to this dilemma: Assume that your life as you know it was the result of being attached to an experience machine rather than reality. Would you choose to stay connected to the machine or would you opt to return to reality knowing that your life would be significantly different if you chose to disconnect?

Notice that there is no specification that life would be better or worse. Only that it would be significantly different.

How would you answer?

The answer is probably obvious if you knew that your life would be better or worse. Change, however, rarely comes with a guarantee.

If anything, experience tells us that most change - either individual or organizational - doesn't achieve its desired outcome. At the organization level, success rates range from 25 percent to 44 percent depending on the study. For individuals, the results are even worse with 92 percent failing to reach their goals.

For most people, the present that you know is preferable to the future that you don't. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in De Brigard's study chose to remain connected to the experience machine rather than return to reality.

Resistance is Your Friend

The absence of resistance does not mean that your change is successful. In fact, there is no change without it. People and organizations don't change easily and overnight. If they could, everyone would wake up tomorrow with something decidedly different about themselves.

Sooner or later, resistance will appear like a giant sandworm from the movie "Beetlejuice" to devour your change. Your first inclination when it does will be to push back ... or at least avoid the resistance. The better choice is to acknowledge and embrace it as a natural part of the change process.

Resistance that comes from well-intentioned people represents either a legitimate fear to be addressed or an important question to be answered. It signals that you are taking significant steps to abandon the comfortable present for the potential of a positive future. Why would you run from that?

Instead of pushing back or running away, respond with a question that pulls you toward the root cause of the question or fear. Only then will you have a legitimate chance to understand and resolve the resistance. Even if there is no solution, putting the resistance out in the open makes it less scary.

Create Discontent with the Status Quo

You disrupt the status quo with emotion not logic. The catalyst is either incredible opportunity or, more likely, crisis that spurs action.

The Washington DC Taxi Transportation Service, for example, now has a mobile app that enhances the customer experience. They could have made this change at any time. They didn't, however, until they were presented with the crisis of Uber and Lyft.

It is the same for individuals. You know that there are changes you could and should make to be more productive in your job, effective in your relationships, or healthier with your life. You have known that things need to change for years and done very little to address them. You weren't emotionally ready.

So what will it take for you to become discontent with the status quo? What is the crisis to be averted or, even better, the incredible opportunity that is too good to miss?

You want things to be better in the coming year. For that to happen, you have to do things differently and/or do different things. Change, by its very nature, forces people to abandon the status quo and overcome their resistance. Your ability to accomplish that will be the barrier you must overcome for success in the coming year.

Randy Pennington is an award-winning author, speaker, and leading authority on helping organizations achieve positive results in a world of accelerating change. To bring Randy to your organization or event, visit www.penningtongroup.com , email info@penningtongroup.com, or call 972.980.9857.

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