So my office building is being torn down. Well, it's not my office building, it's the building that I office out of. And I've been officing out of this building for about 15ish months, not quite a year and a half. And I've only got three days left in the office. And I'm sitting here in the midst of packing and feeling sorry for myself and all the things. And I thought, why not share all about what I'm experiencing with you and couch it in the parallel of organizational change. So this episode isn't necessarily so much about moving offices. It's about why smart, capable people struggle so much with change at work.

So I'll be using my own office relocation as a case study. And I'm going to explore how loss of control fuels resistance, why grief shows up in organizational change, sometimes disguised as pushback, and how our identities get disrupted in the midst of organizational change. I'll also pull in a few examples from earlier in my career to make it more relatable for those of you who are not entrepreneurs, which is probably most of you. So here we go, let's buckle up and get started because this stuff is happening, I mean, here in my studio. The what you see if you're watching on YouTube has not been altered with yet. I haven't packed anything up from what's behind me. Some of the other parts of the studio have been packed up. And in the other room over there where my office is over, oh my gosh, it is a disaster of partially packed boxes, piles of decor that need, you know, special wrapping before they go into boxes.

And it is just a state of disrepair and dishevelment. And of course, in the midst of all of this, I'm trying to get work done, the podcast as well as client work. I have an all day client engagement tomorrow, so I'll be out of the office all day delivering a program on site for a client. So there's just a lot of moving pieces going right now. And I just kind of wanted to sit down on my office sofa one last time and have a good cry about it. But I thought instead of doing that, let's make these parallels between what I'm going through right now and how organizational change hits many people and see if we can't learn something in the process. So let's start with loss of control.

Now, when I signed my lease 15 months ago, I signed a three year lease. I was planning on being in this location for a full three years. And I got to tell you, if you haven't heard me talk about my office in past episodes. I love my office. I love my office so much. I've got this studio space which is set up perfectly for the podcast as well as for when I'm delivering remote keynotes or trainings for some of my clients. So this space works so great from that. It's a little tiny room all onto its own with no windows to the outside, so I can perfectly control the lighting. And I won't say it's soundproof, but the neighbors on either sides of me have been very quiet and it's just been wonderful to have this studio space.

Then in the next room is a big office space. I've got a ginormous desk, a couch, a coffee table, a work table with a couple of chairs, plenty of empty wall space for brainstorming ideas on the giant post it note, pieces of paper. And it's got its own bathroom with a sink, mirror, toilet, and plenty of spaces for me to do a quick wardrobe change if I need to free freshen up before I hop on a, let's say a virtual keynote or something like that. It's got a little kitchenette and by kitchenette it's got a mini fridge, a water cooler that I brought in, and a microwave. So but all the things that I need to sustain a day here and then a nice little hallway and it's just, it's spacious and it's lovely and I hate that the building is being torn down. So loss of control. I have no control over that. So even when I thought a three year lease, which felt like kind of a long time, you know, when that got pulled out from under me, oh man, it hurt.

It absolutely felt like loss of control. So I did not choose for the building to be torn down. And even if the space that I end up at, which we're not quite sure what that's going to be yet, even if that space ends up being better, this loss of agency, like I didn't have any control over it, is really hitting first and hitting hard. All right, so your organizational change parallel. Well, most change initiatives fail to account for how deeply people react to who decided what was going to happen versus what was actually decided. And this ties back and is so illustrative of some research on autonomy and self determination which consistently shows that perceived control. Okay, did you hear what I said there? Perceived control matters just as much as outcomes. So when we feel like we have agency, when we feel like we have some control in the situation, it just makes it so much easier to handle.

Handle and manage and I don't have any control over this situation. In fact, I found out six months ago that my lease was going to be ending early. They did give me a 6 month termination notice and then I requested being let out of my lease earlier than six months because who wants to move in the middle of winter in Minnesota? Nobody. So I thought if I could move in the fall, that would be better. They weren't going to let me out of my lease, so. And again, if you know me, this will land. I am staying here until probably the last hour of my lease before I hand over my keys. It's kind of odd.

Almost everybody in the building has already moved out. So I'm in this large office building by myself. But I get some satisfaction out of that actually. All right. I also was thinking of an earlier career parallel, when I worked at Thomson Reuters. I ran a global UX team and we worked on products and projects all, literally all over the globe. And I had built an amazing team, absolutely an amazing team. Well, an initiative was underway for my UX team and the UX team on the flagship product.

And if you don't know what I mean by UX, it's user experience. So we were a team of people who designed products to make them better and easier for customers to use. Less errors and less service calls and the like. So the two UX teams were combining for organizational efficiency. And even though I personally think it was just that the other UX team thought that I made better hires and they were trying to poach my entire staff in one fell swoop. But again it was a moment of loss of control where it wasn't my decision that was being made and it was happening to me and to the people that I had so thoughtfully hired and brought into the organization. So it hit me on a couple of different levels. The change that as it was impacting me and the loss of control that I had as well as the change that was impacting my staff.

Now all of this is to say or for us to kind of take a step back and reflect on. People don't resist change. They resist being changed. They resist when, you know, and that resistance shows up when we don't have any agency or control over the situation. So leaders often over index on explaining the rationale and they under invest in restoring a sense of agency and a sense of like maybe, yes, acknowledgement, yes, we did not choose this. But inside of this change, where do we have agency? How can we make choices? What can we choose to do differently or better. So I think when that organizational change is hitting you and you're feeling a loss of agency, either you as a leader or you as an individual, I want you to just spend a little bit of time thinking about how can you restore a sense of agency in the midst of what's happening now? Of course I can restore a sense of agency by saying, like, well, I get to choose where I office next and all of those kinds of things. But still, I need to spend the time focusing on that, not focusing on like, oh, the rug got pulled out from under me.

All right, now the second area I want to focus on is resistance. So, yes, I am having some of my own resistance to it. Relinquishing my keys in the. At the final hour is part of my resistance. Um, but that resistance, I want you to just, like take a moment to think about resistance as information. Not necessarily obstruction, not resistance for resistance sake, but as information. So in my office move.

I sometimes find myself thinking, why do I have to do this now? I mean, literally, it is the dead of winter here in Minnesota. We have just had like the worst polar vortex ever now. And so fortunately, I was not moving furniture and boxes of books and all of that in the midst of that. But it's still quite cold here. So there's part of me that's, why do I have to do this now? Okay, seasonally now I'm also in the midst of a really exciting that is not a client project. It is a customer facing project where you all are the customers.

And it's too soon to tell you any more than that, but there is a new product I've been working on, a new big thing that I am so excited about and to have to take down my studio because it's going to be filmed. So to take down my studio, move everything. It's a major project setback. And so I hear myself saying, oh, why does this have to happen now in the middle of this big project? And then of course, this doesn't make any sense because this wasn't supposed to happen. I mean, I knew that the area was slated for redevelopment, but I was told that this building would still be standing for the next three years. So this doesn't make any sense. Why is this happening? Was there a bait and switch? You know, and this is, of course going to slow me down in everything I'm working on. So that kind of resistance often points to real constraints.

Constraints in timing, capacity, cost, all the things. And I'm feeling all of those. Absolutely. And I'm also looking at my own resistance as information because it's not just about the move. It's not just about the logistically packing things up and going and putting them in a different building. There's more to it than that. There's an emotional layer because when you move, you don't move everything. You have to go through things.

So in the midst of all of this, I'm sorting through piles of papers, I'm sorting through old notebooks, I'm going through file cabinets, deciding which things to keep and which things not to keep. So there's a lot of sorting. And that's emotional work, you know, in deciding what to keep and what to let go. Of course there's coordinating logistics. There's this precious vendor, his name is like literally Bob. Bob calls me once a week to ask if he can help arrange the physical move, if he can help get my business Internet switched to the new building. He calls and he's so dang helpful. But I haven't made a decision yet, so I don't know what to tell him.

But there is all this coordination of logistics that go along with this. And that also is a another level of things to not only be grieve, but then also have some resistance to. And then of course, the disruption of real work to do the work of moving, like packing up boxes and selling furniture, so on. Because the big desk that I have out in the other office is way too big for either one of the spaces that we're looking at moving into next. It's awesome for the ginormous office that I have here, but the, the next place is going to be divided up into some smaller offices because I will be officing with one of my speaker friends, which is super exciting. And so she and I are going to have our own separate offices. And so the space is divided up a little bit differently. So that desk just isn't going to work.

Now let's just take a step back and make our organizational change parallel here. Now, in systems thinking, when we think about how large systems and organizations work, resistance often signals some sort of misalignment and friction, not necessarily defiance. When employees are reacting to those second order levels of change that maybe leaders haven't even considered yet, it is really going to hit them on a more emotional level. And again, when the closer you are to the actual change and handling the logistics, the harder it hits. Now, I also have a career parallel from just my regular work, not necessarily the moving part of the work. I have a project that just got completed recently for one of my clients. And it was a customized training, the kind of thing that I do very regularly and I'm usually really excited about. But on this particular project, I kept procrastinating.

Now, there are things I procrastinate about, but client work is not one of them. I love the client work that I do, and I'm excited to come in every day and do it. But I was procrastinating, which for me is definitely a sign of resistance. So I had to take a step back and look at what. What was going on. Where was this resistance and this procrastination coming from? And what I realized is that this particular project, while it did fall in my wheelhouse, it was not the truest alignment to where I could do the most good for that organization. And so I think I was feeling a certain sense of resistance about that, thinking to myself, this is not me being called to my highest and best needs use in this case. Now, the project happened once I actually identified that I was able to break through that resistance and the procrastination that I was doing and get the dang thing done and deliver it.

And it went very, very well. But it also gives me pause and gives me some additional questions for me to reflect on when I'm accepting client work, just to make sure it truly is in alignment. So what I want to leave you with this about resistance is this. Resistance is feedback. And ignoring it is like throwing away test results because you didn't like what the test results said. I mean, that is not being grounded in reality. So resistance is feedback. We need to take a look at that feedback and see what it's teaching us for right now and what lessons we might carry forward.

And I am absolutely doing that in this move as well, because I've had some resistance to wanting to move, which is why I only have three days left in this space. And I have two very solid, viable options. But I do not have assign lease for what comes next. I can also office from home, but again, if you know me well, in fact, hold on, let me tie that one into. Into the next, the next piece here, because the next piece I wanted to talk about is really identity disruption. So when I moved from a home office to an office in an office building, that changed my professional identity. An entrepreneur, a bootstrapping entrepreneur.

Working from home is one thing, but moving into an office, well, that raises the stakes because now you're paying for a lease, you've got a bunch of other overhead costs, and it feels also a little bit more legitimate. Like, I'm not just doing this out of my basement or my garage. This is real. I have an office, I have an address. My clients, my executive coaching clients can come and have sessions here. And some of them have. So we've got, like, lots of different ways in which having the office space changes my professional identity. So the there's just so much that goes into it again, legitimacy, status, professional identity, all gets wrapped up into this.

Now, as we think about the organizational change parallel, well, reorgs, title changes, when who you report to shifts, all of that messes with people's identity. And research on role identity shows that when roles change faster than people can integrate them, their anxiety spikes. Now, one of the possible places that I might move to come three or four days from now is home. I might end up moving back home to office from home for a while. It won't be forever if I do, because I just love having an office outside of my house that much. But that will mess with my identity too. Especially going from that status of, you know, officing out of my home basement to officing out of an office building to then officing back in my home basement office again. So that can really mess with my identity. And I fully anticipate that it will if I end up officeing from home for a short period before finding or landing my next actual space.

Now, I also have another career parallel of this from much, much earlier in my career. Now, if you've listened to episode one of this podcast where I recount my career story, one of the things that happens very early in my career story is that I, I got promoted, I was working for a tech startup and I got promoted to manage my department at a very young age. And so even when it's a good change, that identity disruption can cause anxiety, it can cause fear, trepidation, imposter syndrome. All kinds of things can happen to your identity when you get promoted at an early age, or even if it's not at an early age when you get promoted or have a big career change, even if it's positive, it still messes with your head and messes with your identity. So change just doesn't ask people to do new things. It asks them to become somebody else. And sometimes before they're fully ready.

So that's where I am right now at this stage of the journey. I am grappling with the loss of control. I am grappling with my identity disruption. And I am certainly grappling with my own resistance and the grief that is showing up inside of all of this. Because, again, I do love this space so much, and I'm going to be so sad to leave it. So there we are now again, right on the outside of that wall out there. I'm in the middle of boxes and decisions and sorting through files and papers and all kinds of things. Letting go.

So if you believe in good juju, positive vibes, or just sending kind thoughts from afar, I will gladly take them. And maybe more importantly, I hope this episode helps you be a little bit more patient with yourself and with those around you who might be struggling with change at work right now. All right, my friends, take good care. Catch you next week.