Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping teams and organizations create better working experiences that deliver

better results. Pretty early in 2020, I started getting a lot of questions about how to manage

through change. You know, because of the world sort of

flipping upside down thing. At the time, I'm pretty sure I thought it was a moment, and the

moment would pass, and things would settle, and change would be less in our faces. I mean,

adorable, right? The changes that we're waiting through today are different than a few years ago,

but the pace of change, the constancy of it, the feeling of stability being a thing of the past, it's still present for many of us. And we're all just trying to catch our breath. So let's talk about some ways that we can not just make peace with the constancy of change, but find ways to use it to fuel our

collective ability to excel. Start by acknowledging that change is hard. In the 1960s, a researcher

named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross conducted and published research that's still cited to this day

about the five stages of grief. You've probably

heard of them, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What we owe it to ourselves

to remember is that the change curve, the curve that experts in change management and leadership

used to educate organizations about leading through change is built on top of those same

five stages. In other words,

the human experience of change mimics our experience of grief. That doesn't mean that all change is

tragic, not at all. But change, even the good kind, the kind we've chosen and we're excited about,

involves an ending, the need to say goodbye to the old in order to

make space for the new. It's not always bad, but it may be hard. And if your team or organization

has been weathering a whole lot of changes, before you head into action mode, I want you to

offer yourself just a bit of kindness and grace. Change is hard. The human spirit prefers to know what's

coming. We want things to feel the same. So we need to start with just cutting ourselves a break,

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