Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's been a real interesting space for us to work in because those chief experience officers have often end-to-end processes that include a great deal of technology driving the change, but it's all about getting the people to change how they work, how they think. In some cases, it radically alters and uplevel jobs.
such that a whole new set of soft and personal skills are required for people who used to spend all day making magic with the Excel spreadsheets. We really cut across the spectrum of leaders who are leading something that either is directly technical or technology has become a huge component of the business that they lead or the part of the business that they lead.
It's a great question. The answer is yes, absolutely. And when I began coaching, it just barely existed. As they say, it wasn't a thing. There was a very small number of coaches in the world.
And many of the great ones worked at an organization called the Center for Creative Leadership, still in existence today, originally focused on helping leaders of nonprofits come together and grow as leaders and then expanded beyond into business. And my last boss in a real job, as I jokingly say, said, I need you to go off to this leadership school because we report up to HR.
You have a career trajectory upward here, but frankly, you don't get along well enough with HR people and you need to work on that. And so I'm sending you there to work on that. And it was an absolutely eye-opening week. And so the coach who led our group was a coach of Olympic champions. She was a sports psychologist.
To this day, I still incorporate a great deal of sports psychology or what's now called performance psychology into my practice because athletes engage a coach because they want to win and leaders engage a coach because they want to win. Both of these people want high performance in themselves and in others. And that's why the coach is there, right?
Yes, coaching has a little bit of a therapeutic feel to it, but a coach is not a therapist paid for by the company. The coach is there to help you win at your goals. And in our case, those are largely goals that revolve around their capacity to continue to lead and change and transform businesses. So that coaching was absolutely instrumental to me. It was eye-opening.
Because a good coach helps you face yourself and look at those flat sides and not just the ways in which you're great. When you think about it, it's largely high performers and people who are successful who get sponsored for coaching.
And so it becomes super important that the coach helps you see that what got you here won't necessarily get you where you want to be next and to really face yourself. And how you might be caught up or getting in your own way of that. And by extension, getting in others ways.
Another type of coaching that's been extremely valuable to me because I had absolutely no background running a business or having a small business was hiring a business coach. Someone who was more of an advisor in their style. and who specializes in small practices that are advisory and coaching such as my own. So they have tremendous depth.
And I think part of my takeaway from that is to some extent, a good coach can cross a lot of different areas from life coaching to leadership to specialized industries. It is helpful when your coach has experience relevant to what it is you're trying to do and where you're trying to do it.
Because that particular organization's ability to specialize in the type of business I lead has been enormously helpful to me. And it was one of the reasons that I decided to continue staying focused on leaders and particularly leaders who are leading change often change that exists in part because technology is now available that enable things that couldn't happen before.
It is very helpful to have your coach be specialized.
There is a natural personal process of change. This is a little bit separate from organizational change. Organizational change is about how the company needs to change. But there is every person in it going through their personal process of change as part of this. And this is where we often don't get people across the finish line as leaders.
And that's where the changes get stalled and hung up because there are these perfectly natural, but often very painful stages that we go through with change. And Bill Bridges was one of the early writers on this. I have actually gone back to Bill Bridges model after trying many others since then, because it is beautiful in its simplicity.
He says there are fundamentally three stages that we go through. The first one is losses and endings. The recognition of what we are losing, what is ending. The second one is the big, long transition stage. It is the big one. It is very substantial. And the third one is new beginnings, where that change starts to get integrated into our new sense of identity.
And where leaders often struggle with this, I find, is they are... either thinking of the change themselves or privy to the change much sooner than the people who are on their teams. And so I had a leader who was getting quite impatient with her team because she had moved through losses and endings. Through a transition, she was really starting to transition into new beginnings.
Some of them were still struggling with losses and endings around what would they lose that was familiar to them. Even though they agreed that what was coming was going to be better for them, was in fact going to address a lot of the problems that they complained about a lot. And so...
For a leader, it can be really challenging because you're often a stage ahead or further ahead within the same stage over the people who you lead. And so being patient and just reminding yourself that you need to be patient with others and that impatience does no one any good is a pretty vital self-awareness and other awareness skill to have.
we do find that those stages hold whether you're the leader initiating the change right so it's your choice where you're in control or whether it's a change that's forced upon you such as say an unexpected layoff and suddenly you no longer have that job The stages that your brain goes through are what they are. And you go through a period of loss.
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