https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6sMK06djfw Leading Change with Confidence Carie Weber: Welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Weber, and today I'm flying solo. I’m going to give you some thoughts and some interesting considerations as you try, in your very best way possible, to lead change in your practice or in your organization. This is something that we at Jameson have helped practices do for over 30 years, and I'm finding myself teaching and working through this with doctors and leaders more and more this year. I believe a lot of great decisions and refocusing of vision and changes are being made and introduced into practices to help those practices and those doctors and business owners thrive and be healthier and happier in their professional lives, which is what is most important to us to help doctors and practice leaders do.  So, let's talk today in this episode about change, about why people resist change, and about what we as leaders need to consider as we are leading change in our practices and in our businesses. I believe we'll find that when we get hit with resistance, when those obstacles come our way, chances are we are at a point where we need to make decisions to pursue and persist, re-clarify, and continue to lead forward even when it's hard. So, how to lead change even when it gets difficult. Let's go.  Why do People Resist Change? So first, as we talk about this, we want to think about why do people resist change in the first place? Why is change so difficult in practices? Perhaps it hasn't been that difficult for you, but perhaps you have struggled with incorporating something new into your practice or helping your team adapt to change. And there are a lot of reasons why people resist change, or why practices and teams resist change, or perhaps even the leaders resist change. Your overall busyness and overwhelm can be a determining factor. When we're already very overwhelmed with the workload, the idea of incorporating one more new thing into our day-to-day can be a little stressful at best. And so you can find that people resist. It also may be that they're not against the idea, but their speed of change is very slow because they're busy doing other things, they're distracted, or they're generally overwhelmed and can't handle the idea of taking on one more thing. Lack of respect for the leader can be one of the reasons. Fear of personal loss or fear of failure. The tradition of how it's always been can really help put a roadblock in front of you in terms of that change. The requirement of additional commitment and narrow-mindedness is going to thwart the acceptance of new ideas. The rewards don't match the effort required. These are all just a version of some of the reasons why you may be met with resistance. The fear of the unknown. It won't happen when people are engaged in negative thinking. All of these are reasons why change is resisted.  And then of course, there are the two primary reasons why people resist change. And that's, we've always done it this way, or we've never done it that way. I'm sure all of you can appreciate that that is a primary deterrent for change for many people.  How do we Help our Team Overcome these Mental Roadblocks? So how do we help our teams overcome those mental roadblocks and become more open-minded and willing to not only explore the idea of doing something in a new way or integrating something new into our workflow, but actually implementing that change to where it becomes a habit? I’d like to have everyone visualize a rubber band and visualize yourself as that rubber band. And when we need to use that rubber band, we're often stretching it to wrap around whatever we're using it for. You're feeling stretched when you're asked to change. You're going outside of your comfort zone, and all it takes is one day falling apart or getting really busy, or one team member calling in sick,