Change Leadership: The Eternal Search for Emotional Balance

How does the leader help their team see positive opportunities and embrace organisational change? Here is a simple model to help team members better understand their emotions, evaluate options, achieve emotional balance and make choices on the way forward.

model for emotinal balance


I was sleeping last night when I suddenly woke up at 2 am and started thinking about the first team meeting that I planned to do next morning with my newly appointed unit of operational execution.  I was debating with myself of the best way of making them embrace change and achieve emotional balance. How could they achieve improvement and take ownership as leaders of the change we, as a team, wanted for our professional career and life enjoyment.  How could I explain to them that is good to have problems because this would become our driver that will make us feel so uncomfortable that we would be 100% convinced of the need of change for us?

It sounds really groovy, but to achieve this taking ownership of finding a solution will need to become a habit.  There is the interesting challenge:  a new habit is only adopted when is repeatedly performed over and over again.  It seems easy but we are not taking into consideration that every time we, as humans, face a problem it generates emotions that need to be addressed and analyzed.  So they need to take ownership of the change that will solve the problem, but also need to recognize that the emotions toward the problem might as well be the cause of the problem. Once this analysis is done, it needs to trigger and action from the person.

Quite complex but doesn’t need to be complicated.  We found the need to develop a ‘one size fits all’ model that will drive introspection into knowing more about our emotions, evaluate options for possible solution and drive an action.

By 4 am I came out with a simple model that met all these requirements:  The Four Step Model for Emotional Balance.

Step 1: How does current situation make you feel?  This question motivates the persons to examine their feelings and their relation with the current problem.  The information that we could gather by asking us this question over and over again is quite powerful if we are searching for any correlation in the way problems that we encounter makes us feel.

Step 2: Could this current situation be changed?  Now we start assessing on possible solution and what would it take us to run this solution.

Step 3: Could your attitude towards current situation change?  Then we start challenging ourselves and our ability to adapt and grow as person.  Here is where we can start looking at the problem as an opportunity for continuous improvement.

Step 4: Which change is easier to implement?  Either if you run with an option based on step 2 or 3, and here is where this becomes interesting:  Is your responsibility to take action either to fix problem or to adapt and decide is not a problem but a growing or improving experience.

Problems generate emotions that usually generate stress or anxiety.  It is similar to a storm and the model is the compass that will give us an objective guidance to overcome the storm.  Practice this model on a constant basis and let it develop into a habit.  Cheers!

Ricardo Mock LinkedIn Profile

This article was also published on LinkedIn in June 2016

Further Reading:

Leadership Interview: Morten Mortensen ‘Checking the Temperature of Employee Response to Change

Further Reading: ‘Coaching for Change Leadership’ under Techniques in the Coaches Toolkit

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Author: Ricardo Mock

Africa 24/7 Marine Manager at Maersk Line, Cape Town. Psychologist, Certified Crossfit Trainer, Health Coach and Motivator. Experience working in Project Management (Operations, Human Resources and Sales), innovation driving change. Specialties: Project Management, Sales, General Operations, Lean Six Sigma (LSS GB Certified), ERP´s implementation and Change Management. MBTI Profile: ENFP-T

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