Many business experts agree that we are living in a VUCA world – a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambigious environment.

Learning to navigate through times of rapid change and adopting an agile mindset is a skill that is becoming increasingly important to achieving success.

In this class we will explore the emotions of change and how that impacts change efforts, how we can use our understanding of psychology to plan for change and foster an agile mindset in ourselves and others.

Change is ever present in both our personal and professional lives. We cannot avoid it, and so we need to be able to deal with change in an effective way.

Give participants 1 min to reflect on any changes they have experienced recently (good and bad!)

Debrief - change is varied, we can view it as positive, negative, big or small. Change is unpredictable – it’s all about adaptation.

Beyond having to deliver change efforts, what's more challening and common today is to be constantly agile in the face of change. We'll be explore both sides of this today.

Changes, such as the ones we just covered, can trigger threat responses in us and these can reduce our performance. As we will have just seen, these reactions are different for everyone – in terms of both the response and the thing that triggered it.

In many change efforts, positive responses are often rewarded and praised, and adverse reactions are are viewed as unprofessional.

However, change is a very subjective experience and all emotions play an integral role in an individual’s change journey. A key element of successful change leadership begins with recognizing and harnessing the impact emotions can have.

Think of a change you are experience and plot where you feel you are in the change curve

The way that we respond to change depends on the way we appraise it and the assumptions we make. It is the way we are thinking that determines the way we respond, not the change itself.

If we can adopt the right mindset, then we are more likely to see change as an opportunity and respond positively, rather than perceiving it negatively and resisting it.