4 Phases Of Change

Disturbing times for a friend of mine. He was recently rocked by the unexpected receipt of divorce papers. Unpleasant and debilitating.

With everything still raw, we got to talking about how people react to a significant change event.

I recall I’d blogged on this kind of thing in a wildly different context nearly five years ago.

With the advent of smartphones, we could check the facts instantly.

The first result on the google page was from Australia. With these four stages;

denial
resistance
exploration
commitment

On the basis that solution selling is at its heart about understanding how people perceive the impact of proposed change on them, then this is invaluable advice.

The above page has fascinating further detail on what happens in the resistance phase:

1. Control/power/helplessness – a feeling there is no choice
2. Loss/grief – a feeling an important part of life is being lost
3. Risk – a feeling that the change brings danger
4. Conflict/anger – a feeling of a need to lash out at someone

It strikes me as an essential part of your continual mapping process to attribute each player prospect-side one of these four marks. Then work out who needs progressing and with the help of which other people.

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As a further idea, a rogue result was returned (as google is generally rubbish as we all know) related to the ‘states of matter‘;

solid – liquid – gas – plasma

If you need imagery to use as a hook to make the above-mentioned change phases stick in the mind, I fancy these would fit the bill nicely.

Gas is the chaos of denial, Plasma is gas heated up and so equates to resistance, Liquid represents the fluidity of exploration, and Solid is the robust strive towards commitment.