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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You go through a period of transition where, as Bridges says, it's as if you're on a ship and you look back and suddenly you can no longer see the shore. But you're looking out ahead and all you can see is water. So when my client was getting impatient and her team was getting a little uncomfortable with that impatience, it was because she could start to see the shore on the other side.
All they could see was water, right? They were just not quite caught up with her yet. Now, I do think that there are some do's and don'ts that can help move yourself and others through these stages. There are a number, but a few that anyone could put in place. The first, obviously, Vince, you want to secure your basic survival needs. Those are going to help to ground you.
Go take a look at your bank accounts. Go cut your expenses if you're worried about that. Do what you need to do to have a sense that your basic survival needs are met. This is really going to help to ground you in the moment. Now, a second one that sounds totally woo-woo is to build hope.
And the way that we build hope is by envisioning what your life will look like, say, 12 to 18 months from now, if the change turns out in the best possible way. And if you're a leader, this is often a gap that I see. So... I'll take this same client as an example. She had very much envisioned what the future would look like for the organization. She's a business genius.
She's on the short list of clients who, when she was doing a 360 and I contacted the EAs of the senior most team, Man, those guys couldn't call me fast enough. Oh, she has something that she needs from me. I'm in, right? So it's super business genius.
But the challenge was that she needed and didn't realize she needed her people to actually envision what their lives would look like if this change turned out in the best possible way. Not just their work, right? Not just what is best for the business, but who are you with? What's your life like? What are you doing? What are you saying? Where are you? How do you feel when you look back?
That builds hope. And interestingly, a lot of leaders will want to mix this up with planning and road mapping. That's not what this is. This is connecting the change that you want to lead to the individual's reasons, their big whys. Not yours. Not the company's. A couple others that are important do's are to strengthen personal bonds.
We instinctively go in when change comes and think we have to power through it alone, but we do not. And the more you're going through it together with others, the stronger. So reach out and strengthen those personal bonds. And I think also one that can be difficult but so vital is to look for that hidden gift in what seems like a bad situation.
It's such a great question. And as you were talking about this experience of you leave, you're starting a business, you see your colleagues get promoted. They're still sitting in their six-figure incomes. Oh, believe me, that one resonates with me personally. And it's not a straight line.
When I started this business, which is actually my second business, a few years after it started, we hit the dot-com bust.
and the business sank right and really struggled and then again we got hit in 2008 when the economy collapsed in the united states and it is so easy to fall into the self-sabotage and i want to really convey the important message that when you start to feel yourself self-sabotage that's not you That's the saboteur neural networks in your mind firing up. That's all that is.
And they're sitting in there and they jump out when they get a signal that indicates that there's a threat to survival.
Yeah, I think it's a great question because it is very much our current situation for many businesses. And I wish the answer were super simple. It's not quite as simple as I wish it were because it does depend a little bit on your situation. So, In the hybrid work model, are people going into the office to just work on their own work?
If so, I'm not sure you're going to get huge benefit out of that in terms of lessening politics or political alliances because they're not really interacting that much. Nor do I think you're going to get, you know, much of the benefit of obviously of working on very complex problems together if you're not really there to work together.
The other particular challenge I'll play you in is most of the clients that we work with are distributed not throughout one metropolitan area, but across the globe. And so... Sure, if your team is largely local and you can get together fairly regularly with intention, with the purpose of working on complex problems, right? Coming to very challenging agreements together.
Sure, you want to do that in person. You are going to get a better result. But if your team is distributed around the globe, I would question how much significant benefit there would be to going into an office. You would all just be in different offices.
So I think you really have to look at being incredibly purposeful for when you get together and to work on the talk stuff when you are together and not just simply trust that. The fact that you can have a lunchtime conversation in and of itself is going to be a nod.
In fact, one of my clients is working on what they call more a sense of belonging or connectedness across their very global organization. And they're experimenting with all kinds of things to help build more of that personal trust. I'll let you know how those experiments go across time, because this is a significant challenge. People who are lonely at work and don't feel connected.
It's a big problem. It's a big problem in a lot of places. It causes a lot of additional problems. And from my point of view, it feeds notions of politics because there are people who feel connected and people who don't feel connected. And if you feel more connected, you're going to be more of an insider, right?
You're going to have more of an understanding of the political dynamic and the needs of other people. So I think that this is one we need to keep observing, assessing, and experimenting with across time. It's a super new way to work when you look at how very many years people work together in person. And it's really only been the last few where the majority do not work together in person.
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