Change is Now the Job: The CS Leader’s Guide to Mastering Change in Modern CS

Oh, thank you all for having me. He said, "Are you okay if I introduce you like that?" And I said, "Are you okay if you introduce me like that?" Thanks for coming. I'm excited to chat with you all today about how to become masterful change leaders. Everything is changing.

And so how do we leverage our own human intelligence to do that in the most efficient, effective way possible? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. As Justin mentioned, I am obsessed with pushing boundaries, professional development, physical development, mental, emotional, and because I have this extra personality, I've had to learn to manage myself really well. Because when you're extra, if you don't manage yourself, your strength becomes your weakness.

And so my whole life, I've had to get good at self-management. And so really, managing change is a lot of what I've studied over the last 20 years. And so we'll talk a lot about some of the science behind how to be the most effective change leader you can be. So change is the way.

But humans are actually programmed to resist change. So today we're gonna talk about how to leverage our human intelligence to help instead of hinder. And yes, there are two Star Wars references on this slide. We are gonna geek out today.

But I won't talk about Star Wars any more than that. But as humans, we have not evolved, and certainly tech is changing quick. Our human tech is not changing. We are very much still the hunter-gatherer biological makeup.

And so we are incented to prioritize caution over curiosity. Back in the day, if you had something wrestling in the bushes, you weren't gonna go check out what that was because it might eat you, right? So to survive and to evolve, our biology prioritizes caution over curiosity. Which is funny because so much of what we were talking about in all these presentations and with Chuck is, hey, let's not be the critic, let's be the explorer, right?

So this is how to work with yourself to override the natural tendency of being the critic so you can become the explorer. And so that you can also bring everybody along with you. So today we'll talk a little bit about change landscape. We're not gonna spend a lot of time there.

You all have been hearing about that this entire conference, right? It's everywhere. But we'll talk just briefly about it to set the stage. We're gonna spend the most amount of time talking about how to biohack self-confidence as a leader.

How do you get yourself comfortable with taking that leap of faith and bringing others with you? And then we'll talk about how to bring some of your decision makers with you through the science of storytelling, flipping what could be perceived as a threat in change into an incentive. And then last, how to bring your team with you. We won't spend a ton of time there either.

Again, we're gonna spend most of the time talking about how to leverage your own human intelligence to keep up with the rate of change with all the artificial intelligence. So you've probably heard this, what got you here won't get you there. And the game has changed. And actually now the game is changed.

So a little bit about change. Fourth Industrial Revolution is different than the prior because it's everywhere. It's the connectivity of the internet of things creating big data that we layer machine learning and AI on top of and then have like these headless motions of eliminating process and teams and procedures. The velocity of change.

You've probably heard a lot about that. You feel it. Last week something comes out. This week we're experts.

We've got an acronym for it. Everybody's adopted it and we're on to the next. You can develop, we were having dinner last night and there was some tech that was developed and launched in 22 hours. Like it's just happening fast.

And then it's everywhere, right? Everything is in scope. It's your team, your department, your company, your leadership, your customers, the expectations. Everything that you do is in scope for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

So we better be good at it, right? If we're gonna be changing quickly everywhere all the time, we gotta be good change leaders. The irony is, like I mentioned, humans are resistant to change. Our biology is programmed to keep us safe and to help us evolve.

And so I'm gonna cover these four areas around what type of biological resistance we can overcome. But like literally I could go on for an hour about how we're all programmed, biologically and through our neuroscience, to resist change. So we've got the 74 millisecond reflex, a threat reflex. This is fight or flight.

The amygdala senses change or threat and in 74 milliseconds you're either running or you're fighting. That happens without the ability to think and for good reason. You can't think when you're under threat. But it works against us in a change environment where actually a change in your tech stack could be seen as predator, right?

Your body is gonna release adrenaline and cortisol and you have the natural resistance. So we'll talk more about that. Additionally, the brain is lazy. The basal ganglia is programmed to keep us safe metabolically because the brain consumes 20% of our calories.

So if we're not careful, we can actually put ourselves at risk by overexerting and having too many calories and we can actually go toward thinking. So the brain is programmed to be lazy. We'll talk more about that. The prediction error attacks.

So we have dopamine hits, a neurotransmitter that make us feel real good, as an incentive to predicting something accurately. We like predictability. We don't like change. And we are programmed to get that through a little reward with each of our dopamine hits every time we accurately predict something.

So when we're changing something, we don't get that dopamine hit and you actually get uncomfortable. So we'll talk more about that. My favorite is the RAS Gatekeeper. The Reticulated Activating System is a filter that takes 99.9% of the information that comes your way and filters it out as spam.

The little bit that gets in is what you have decided is important. So we literally get to program our own matrix through our RAS that tells us what we care about and lets that information in. It's why in a crowd that's noisy, you can hear your name from a distance because you've programmed your brain to care about your name. It's why when you buy a new car, you see it everywhere.

It's not that there's more of those cars out there. It's now that you've programmed your brain to be able to accept that information as worthy. So if we're pitching change and we don't have our teams programmed to care about what we're talking about, they're gonna filter it as noise, we also in this situation, if you force information that isn't part of your RAS, we will look at the negative. There could be 100 positive things and we're gonna automatically bring up the negative because we are programmed to look at ways to protect against change if it's not something that we care about.

So we'll bring all of these things together and talk a little bit more about how to build a framework for yourself as a confident leader and then bring your decision makers along with you. In addition to being programmed to resist change, we've got a big confidence gap in ourselves as leaders through change. 18% of leaders don't feel prepped and ready to lead through change. 11% of executives don't feel confident in managing the friction that's gonna come through the process.

And the good news is our CEOs are more confident in us than we are, but only 40% of them are confident that we as execs can lead through the fourth industrial revolution. So we have change everywhere all the time at a rate that's increasingly fast. We've got biology that is resistant to change for ourselves, for our decision makers and our adopters. And we have a confidence gap as leaders in our ability to get through the change.

So let's talk about how biohack self confidence as leaders so that we don't have to fight all of the neurology, but we can actually use it to our advantage and leverage it to be good leaders. We talk about confidence as a prereq to getting started in a lot of cases. If you're confident, you can get up on a stage and have a conversation. If you're confident, you can lead into uncertainty where there's no certain outcome, there's friction for sure, there's potential for failure.

You better be confident before you lead, before you pitch, before you ask for an investment in a tool that you're not certain how it's gonna turn out or if it's gonna give you the ROI you expected. The thing about confidence though, is it's a byproduct of action. Trust is what is required to get started. You need that leap of faith to trust in yourself that yeah, I don't know what the outcome's gonna be.

I have a really good idea. I've got a plan. I have mitigation strategies. I better trust myself though to take that first step and take the leap of faith.

With that then comes action. With the action comes experience and feedback, right? Did it work? Did it not?

Do you need to pivot? Do we adjust? And from that then, we build confidence. So if you wait for confidence to start, you'll be in the waiting place.

And if you read Dr. Seuss like I do, you know that that's not a good spot to be. So let's talk about how to train trust as a leader. This is Dr.

Shadeh Sahari's work on training trust through four attributes that science has shown you can actually impact outcomes within six weeks of pretty concentrated focused dedicated effort. We're gonna go through each of these with some scenarios around where you might be lacking trust and living in a space of doubt and where that might be holding you back. And then how to train yourself out of that. So acceptance.

Am I enough? Agency. Can I handle this? Autonomy.

Do my choices make a difference in outcomes? Do I have that power? And then last, adaptability. Can I manage myself through the stress of change?

Can I work through the emotions that are sure to come with the friction, the doubt, the judgment, the potential failure with change? So let's talk about acceptance. Am I enough? If you're doubting yourself, you're in a space of self rejection where you don't feel like you're enough.

And some of the symptoms that you might experience, and now you may not at the surface think of yourself as somebody who is not accepting of yourself. But overachieving is one of the main symptoms of a lack of self acceptance. And actually most high achievers have a symptom of overachieving, right? And I'm guilty of this.

I'm only as good as my last win. I'm only as good as my last fail. I have to keep going and achieving and growing and pushing so that I can feel accomplished. Rather than understand that I've got this foundation of accomplishments that I can lean on, even if the next one fails, I'm still pretty dang good.

I still add value. And so holding space for yourself as worthy in the face of what might be a challenge in the moment or a fail and not needing to necessarily overachieve. We'll talk more about that. Productivity guilt.

You're the first one in, you're the last one out, you answer the email quickest. And if you take a vacation, you're working the whole time because you only feel worthy when you're working. People pleasing, you say yes way too fast and way too often. Might not be the thing that you needed to do.

It wasn't on your priority list. It's not your highest and best use, but you said yes. And then over apologizing, I'm also guilty of this. Now I've programmed my RAS to be aware of this.

I have a theory that women apologize more than men. And so I'm aware of it and I see it. So I don't know if that means it's true. But I myself, if I'm in a meeting and two of us speak up at the same time, I'll be the first to say sorry and back down and let that other person speak as if what I was gonna say wasn't as relevant.

So let's talk about how to overcome those traits and train yourself into a mode of trust where you feel worthy. So in the over apologizing space, it's simple. You flip sorry to gratitude. You gotta be aware of it.

But instead of saying sorry and backing down, hold your space, keep talking. And then at the end say thank you for bearing with me. I'm really passionate about this. And don't say sorry.

If you're overachieving, one of the best ways to work against that is get a hobby. So Nobel winning scientists are three times more likely to have a hobby than those that don't have a Nobel Prize. And the theory is it's important in science where you have a lot of rejection to have a persona attached to something outside of your career. So I am more than my job.

I have all kinds of hobbies that I can attach myself to. Maybe I'm a mom, a wife, and I also have these other hobbies. But it's good to have balance in how you understand who you are. In addition, a hobby allows you to activate a creative spot of your brain.

But most importantly, a hobby lets you get good at not being good at something. So it's OK. It's low pressure to get out there and kind of suck at something. You're new or you maybe just are never going to be great at it.

You keep doing it. And that trains you to hold space for yourself as worthy, even when you're not overachieving. And last, with a hobby, some of the most successful people say the trick to success is just getting good at showing up. Over and over and over again, you start, right?

Sometimes you fail. But guess what? You come back and you start again. So the hobby is a great one to overcome some of the acceptance issues if you're in that doubt mode.

Last is intentional delay. If you're a people pleaser and you say yes way too fast, way too often, studies have shown that if you just take a second, if you delay your response, you are more likely to have a more appropriate response for what you need. So thank you for thinking of me. Let me take a look at my calendar.

I'll get back to you. If you decide it's not your highest and best use or on your priority list, you get back to them and say, thank you for thinking of me. I can't fit it in right now. But feel free to reach out again.

So try the intentional delay. And all of this will hopefully lead you into a space where you're training your acceptance into worthiness, where you feel effective and enough at being willing to lead change. Agency, can I handle this? Am I ready to drive change with a huge investment from my board?

Or do I feel like I could potentially be ineffective at this and I'm not ready? Some of the signs that you're struggling, imposter syndrome, Chuck brought it up today. I think it was Chuck. They're gonna find me out.

You feel like there's a spotlight on you. And high achievers, 85% of high achievers have imposter syndrome. And it makes sense. We're constantly pushing beyond comfort zones into spaces that we're not experienced in.

And so you do feel like a fraud for a minute until you prove to yourself that you can do it. And then you're on to the next. One of the best ways to get around imposter syndrome is to take what feels like a spotlight so everybody's looking at you, right? And turn it into a flashlight where you're pointing it out at where you need to go, what you need to find out, what skills you need to build, the people you need to gather for your team to do the project.

Funny enough, Pulse was sending out, the insight was sending out emails, advertising Pulse, literally called it the spotlight and put my session on there with a handful of other speakers. And my team found it. They sent it around the office. Look at Heather's gonna be presenting and she's one of the ones there spotlighting.

I immediately was like, what am I doing? Who do I think I am? Getting up in front of 400 people talking about how to become a confident change leader. I'm still learning every day, right?

Who do I think I am? The way around that is like, okay, no, I can do this. I'm gonna take that spotlight and turning it into a flashlight. What do I think these people would enjoy learning about?

What have I obsessively learned about that I can share in a way that's helpful for them to move forward in the space of the fourth industrial revolution? I got this, right? So it's just a matter of changing the spotlight to a flashlight. Comparison's another symptom of doubt in the space of agency.

Oh, look at them. They always have, they get up on that stage, they do so good, they're not even stressed. I could never do that. So comparison is, they say is the thief of joy, right?

So the way around that, one of the ways, is to think about emulating instead of comparing. When I came to Clear Capital 15 years ago, I was shutting down a financial planning business, it was the great recession, I was a yoga instructor. I had zero transferable skills to head into Clear Capital. They had HR positions, open marketing positions.

I applied for all of them, got none of them. And I decided, you know what? I'm going at the ground floor. I want to be at that company, those are the people I want to be with.

They're in Tahoe, it's where I live now and where I wanted to be. I'll just figure it out. I have no idea what that means, but I trust that I'm going to figure it out. And so in those early days, and still to this day, I'd get into meetings and I'd have amazing people to my left and right, and I would watch them.

What are they doing that makes them successful? What can I borrow from what they're doing and make it mine in an authentic way and use that to get better? And so emulation instead of comparison becomes your way out of that self-judgment really around do I have the agency to be ready to lead the change? Additionally, you may not feel like you have the skills.

You legitimately may not have the skills. However, if you dig, you may have transferable skills that are very applicable. So in the 80s, Nike was in trouble. They needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

They opened up a design contest thinking, we don't know how to make this better. Maybe somebody else has an idea. A guy named Tinker Hatfield, who was a corporate architect for Nike at the time, decided to enter the contest. He was not a designer.

He had no experience, but he thought, you know, I saw this building where all of the inner workings of the building, the stairs, the escalators, they were on the outside of the building. What if we put a window into the shoe where the air pocket is and you could actually see the air pocket on the sneaker? And that became, he won the contest. That became the Nike Air and Tinker Hatfield is credited with saving Nike in the 80s, right?

He did not have the skill set of a designer, but he used a skill set that he did have to apply it in a way that added a ton of value. You can also grow skill sets, right? And you can surround yourself with people who have the skills that you need. Good leaders surround themselves with people who have the skills necessary to succeed.

So rather than feel overwhelmed or ineffective, know that you can use what you have, you can grow skills, or you can find the people that have them. Autonomy, do my choices make a difference? If I'm doubting myself, I feel resigned to being powerless. I'm stuck, there's nothing I can do here.

But if I'm trusting myself, I feel ownership over my outcomes. I feel like I can make choices that impact the outcomes. Some of the signs that you struggle here is identifying with losses, or really being stuck in a victim mindset. And some of the signs there are words like always, and never, I always get passed over for the promotion.

I never get selected for those projects. And I really wanna be. So some of the ways around this are to move from the, I should, which is really just self judgment, right? Should have done this, I should have done that.

People say like, why do you should all over yourself? Like what are you doing? It's a disempowering judgment of yourself. But if you move that into a space of, no, I could make a list of those things, you actually activate your brain from a disempowered state that's emotional to an activated divergent thinking space in your brain that puts you back into control and action.

So make your list, what could you do? You don't have to do all the things, but then of that list, what will you do? Make it small, start small, right? Don't go big, because then you get back into the overwhelm space, but make them small.

And then you start to get the dopamine hits when you actually take action. You start to believe a little bit more that you've taken a leap of faith, you've got the action, you got the experience, and now you've got the confidence. So go from I should, I could, and then I will. Additionally, there's this concept of the internal locus of control.

Focus on what you can control, not what you can't, right? Control your controllables. And so the minute you find yourself feeling as if you are a victim or stuck or incapable, start to think differently. Focus on the other side of it.

What is in your control? There's a lot that is in your control, so start there. So moving into ownership over your outcomes through action. Adaptability.

Can I handle my emotions through the challenge, frustration, and fear of change? If you're in a doubt mode, you just feel totally overwhelmed. And we've all been there. I get there pretty regularly.

And then I get myself out of it. But if you're in trust mode, you're grounded. You just feel like you're capable of handling what's coming your way. Now the thing about our brains, just like we talked about that 74 millisecond threat response, we process emotion first.

There's no way around that. You can't just not be emotional. But what you can do is manage your emotions in a space where if you observe that you're kind of spiraling, stuck, having some really negative thoughts over and over and over again, just observe the fact that you're doing it. And then they say, if you say the word out loud, just say the word of the emotion.

Fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, overwhelm. It puts you into a metacognitive state that flips your brain back into rational thought. It gets you out of the emotional space of your brain and back into rational thought. Just simply observing the thought changes the way that you're handling it.

So humans are special. We are the only animals that have metacognition available to us. And there's a lot of ways you can go with that. That simple, simple one of just naming what you're feeling brings you back into a space of rational thinking.

There's this other concept of physically getting small. That's a biological protection mechanism, right? If you're under attack, you're gonna get as small as you possibly can so that predator doesn't eat you. But you'll notice, if you notice, your shoulders are slumped or your chin is down.

You can actually change your neurology with your biology in the physical posture that you have. Neck flexion, the distance between your chin and your chest, is one of the best ways to immediately change your outlook and perspective and energy. So like lifting your chin when you feel down or overwhelmed or whatever the word is will help. Additionally, smiling, even if you don't feel like smiling, releases endorphins that makes you feel good and again, puts you back into a space where you can actually flip your energy, get back into a rational thought process, and take control back.

There's that scene, if y'all are Ted Lasso fans, where Rebecca, the owner of the soccer club, is heading into a lunch with her ex-husband and she's super intimidated and she's in front of a mirror and she gets down on the ground and she's, (growling) just goes big and makes that noise like she's an animal. But that energy, pulling your chest open, shoulders back, that changes your perspective and it changes your brain. So those are a few ideas on how to get into a trusted space where you feel grounded, you're gonna process emotions, you may get stuck in them, but these are ways to get yourself unstuck so that you can move forward with trust in yourself as a change leader in a space that's uncertain. So now you know how to be an expert at biohacking your own confidence so that you can trust yourself and take a leap of faith into change.

How do you bring your decision makers along with you? They've got the money, they're the ones deciding what your prioritization can be, but they also have that same biology that's very resistant to change. So how do you bring them with you? You can use story to navigate around this concept of change being a threat and not being seen as a predator, but instead we can motivate our decision makers to come along with us.

So this is Donald Miller's story brand framework and it goes something like this. Our RAS is program to think about what we care about. If you're coming at your decision maker with something you care about, but they don't care about, you're losing right out of the gate. They're gonna look at all the negative things, could be 100 positive things, they're gonna find the two negative things because their brain is lazy, they're trying to be efficient, and they're not gonna have energy to care about what you care about.

It's not what they care about. So what do they want? And then what problems are they trying to solve? You have to structure the change, the investment, the decision around a solvable problem.

And specifically there are three ways to think about a problem. An external problem, we've gotta get a customer success platform. We literally are losing all the data around our customers. We don't know if they're happy with our products.

We don't know if we have churn risk. We have no insights that we can action on. We need a customer success platform. To the internal problem, which is more about the feelings around it.

Now, as a leader, you don't wanna be all up in your feelings, but you do want your decision makers to be in their feelings because that's where we're motivated to act. So how does that make you feel? I'm worried. I lose sleep at night as a CEO of this company, not knowing if my customers are enjoying my product, getting value from it, if they're at risk for churn, and if my product roadmap is pointed in the right direction.

But here's the kicker, the philosophical problem with words like ought to and shouldn't have, that's really where you hook your audience into coming with you and getting motivated to make decisions. So we need a customer success platform. We're losing important data. It keeps me awake at night.

And you know what? As the CEO of this company, you shouldn't have to lay awake at night wondering if your customers are churning, if your product roadmap is appropriate, if your investments into that product roadmap are where they should be. So that's how you position what they care about from a problem that they need to solve. And then of course you position yourself as the expert guide, right?

You have empathy, you have experience, and the good news is you're ready to lead the change because now you trust yourself to do that. You're gonna lead the change that they need to solve these problems. So you position yourself that way, right? I did that at the start of this, right?

I'm super involved in pushing myself forward, mentally, physically, emotionally, and I've got stuff to share with you all. I'm not like the world's foremost expert on it, but I know enough to share, so you do the same thing. Then, because we have a basal ganglia that likes to prioritize being lazy, metabolically keeps us safe that way, we have to make it easy and clear. If you're explaining you're losing, right?

Make it clear. Anticipate what they're gonna be confused about and address that head on. Make sure that you have a really easy call to action for them, just like you went from should to could to will with small steps. They need an easy next step to take so they can hook into it and move forward.

Paint the success and failure. Tell a story, right? We are engaged as humans with stories. So what is the change gonna help avoid?

What's the happy ending look like? What does it look like when success is here? And most importantly, let's talk about what that means from a transformational standpoint. If you can create an aspirational transformation attached to that change and that happy ending, now you've got me emotionally hooked.

I care about what you're talking about. You're solving my problem. You're positioning yourself as the expert guide. You have a plan.

All I have to do is the easy thing that you told me to do and I know what the carrot is dangling in front of me and I'm motivated by that. So use the science of storytelling to bring your decision makers along with you. If you are making yourself, as the kids, as my daughter would say, if you're coming from your POV with main character energy, you're gonna lose. You gotta make it about them.

So now you've got yourself in a position of trust. You're ready to take the leap of faith. You've got a good plan. You got your decision makers to approve your project.

They invested in it. Now it's time to bring the team along with you. I'm not gonna spend a ton of time here and I could. Each one of these things we could deep dive.

But mainly because bringing the team with you is a combination of treating them like you're treating yourself in the way that you're gonna build trust with autonomy and the way that you've brought your decision makers along with you from their point of view telling a story. So it looks something like this at a very, very high level. Before you have any plans baked for change, socialize it with your team. If you come to them with decisions that have been made, you've cut them out of the ability to actually become part of the decision maker with you.

You've eliminated their ability to have autonomy and agency in the process and they're probably not gonna be super bought into it. Frame it from their point of view. They are the hero. What are their problems that they care about that you're gonna solve and how do you get them motivated to come with you?

If you're implementing a new technology, if it's good for the company, it has to be good for them in some way, right? So that pitch you made to your decision makers on the same exact tool is gonna look very different when you pitch it to your team to adopt it. There will be different benefits and you can be authentic in both of those storytelling exercises, but you gotta frame it from their perspective. Same thing with our customers, right?

When we're getting them to adopt any type of change, why do they care? Why would they change something that they're used to doing when we prioritize familiarity, when we hate change, and we're not willing to exert energy on things that are frivolous? So frame it from their perspective. Last, seek feedback, not last, but next, seek feedback.

So this is where you give them the autonomy and you don't have to open it wide up. You give them a very risk safe set of things that you want A or B, and you know if they choose A or B, you're cool either way. Like isolate the choices into a safe space for you as a leader in your deployment and your objectives, but give them choices. And then make sure they see that you've accepted their choices and how that plays out.

Let them understand that they're bought in, they're making a difference, and they have autonomy in the process as well. This last bullet we could spend an entire hour on in my presentation last year was almost all about this, but when you get ready to launch, there are just good change management practices to put into place. You start small, you have a pilot, you have some KPIs that you prove out initially, then you have a measured transition into the broader scope. You've got a kill switch.

If things go terribly wrong, you can turn it off and you can roll it back. And then, does it work? Get the experience. Take the action, get the experience, build the trust back into the process, pivot if you need to, right?

You don't have to be married to executing the way that you thought you were gonna execute when you started. So this is bringing your team with you, but really it's just a combination of how you're treating yourself to build the trust and how you're treating your decision makers to get them on board with caring enough to come along with you. So in conclusion, start with yourself. Biohack your confidence because you are genetically engineered to resist change and change is everywhere and we've gotta be good at it.

So get on board by working with your attributes that you can train to build that trust. And believe me, there are things that you can work on. We all have them, right? We're constantly struggling with overcoming our human condition.

So figure out what pieces. And it changes. What pieces and when do you need to work on? Then sell it to your decision makers through the science of storytelling from their POV.

They are the main character. And then finally, get your team to come on board with you, bring them in early, let them make some decisions, make sure that you have a measured transition as you roll it out and off to the race as you go. So we've talked about a lot of stuff. I didn't get to go very deep on a lot of it, but if you're interested in double clicking, these are some of the books and podcasts that will help get you deeper into these topics.

So Big Trust, that's the Four Trainable Attribute Framework. Story Brand is the science of storytelling. A few other books on top there that I like and you'll probably get value out of. And then on the bottom are the podcasts.

My most favorite podcast, by the way, shout out to podcasts. You can be doing anything in your life and listening to a podcast, except working. Huberman Lab, he is the leading neuroscientist at Stanford University and he teaches me every day how to manage myself in a position that I can optimize outcomes on every level of my life. So shout out to that.

And then of course, if you all wanna connect, that's my LinkedIn, feel free to chat with me. I am by no means the scientist expert in the space, but I do spend a lot of my time focusing on how to manage my extra and I'd be happy to chat with you more about that as well. So thank you. (audience applauding) All right, thank you, Heather.

That was as awesome as I said it was gonna be, right? That was great. Do we have the questions up here? Can I take a selfie with you guys before we pull questions up?

Smile. Thank you. All right, so you talked about the difference between waiting for confidence versus building trust first. And that confidence is actually an outcome of action.

For someone in the room who feels paralyzed right now about a big change they need to lead, what's the smallest first action you tell them to take today? Mm, I gotta love the Rebecca Ted Lasso thing. Like literally just get in the mirror and like start doing some, ah. You know that, lifting your chin, smiling, like those are the littlest things.

And every moment you realize that you're feeling a little stuck, you can start to flip the script in that way. I also think it's super simple to do that, like let's just think about what we're feeling. And journaling, they say, is a really good way to get yourself out of a dysregulated state, talking about things actually triggers more trauma in your brain the way that the brain processes, but writing about something when you're dysregulated actually helps you get more into that rational space so you stop the overwhelm and you get back into autonomy. So those are just a few.

But I think, you know, also thinking, you've been through hard things before, right? You've gotten through every single one of your hard days in the past, why wouldn't you get through this one? And it's okay to feel like you might not because that's part of the process. Just understand that and then move forward.

And this is an interesting one. What signals tell you a team is adapting psychologically, not just complying procedurally? Ask your senior manager of enablement what their side chat's all about because they have one without you on it. My senior manager of enablement is here with me today and I legitimately will go to her if I've rolled something out.

First of all, you know when your team is quiet, if there's silence in a meeting, especially at a clear capital meeting where we're all tending to be a little extra, I know that it's not hitting, right? You know your team, you can pick up on their vibes, but also have some one-on-ones chat with the people you know that they chat with and understand what's going on. I would say as a leader too, one of the best things you can do is make sure that you're approachable. Like really be okay with hard feedback and make sure they know that they're safe to come to you.

Make yourself approachable. Let's see. How do you prioritize and sequence change initiatives when multiple changes are happening at once, especially to avoid change fatigue and ensure teams can still effectively absorb and adopt the most critical messages and behaviors? Yeah, that's a good one.

I really try to avoid big change all at the same time, even if it's just a little bit of distance between one point and the other. But I think if you have to do it that way, I'd say first, you have to do it that way. And if you do have to do it that way, I would do a lot of workshops where you're coming together for feedback. If we change something, we're getting together pretty often to talk about, like what's the, you know, this was our intention with the change, what's your experience?

Do we need to adjust? Also, if you're doing something in Gainsight, like if you're gonna roll out a new CTA, we're doing the math to understand what it's gonna do to their cockpit before we roll it out. How many of these CTAs are you gonna get hit with? Try to understand the impact before you roll it out, but then definitely space it if you can, and if you can't, and even if it's not, even if it is spaced, make yourself available to have a lot of really open, honest feedback as you move through it.

So we as leaders play an important part in reducing imposter syndrome in our teams. Can you share a favorite story or tip for helping to manage these folks? So my most recent one is this Gainsight, where they literally sent the email, and I was like, oh my goodness, what did I get myself into? For me, it's just part of my process.

I know, I've been pushing myself for so long, and I come from a very low income background. I have been faking it to make it my whole life. The only person in my family with a college degree, I'm constantly in a space that's uncomfortable, and so I just know it's part of who I am, and I have to deal with it. Just this morning, I was on the phone with my husband and my daughter, like what did I get, why am I doing this again?

Remind me, why am I doing this? And they both said, because you love it, and you're gonna do great at it. Like you just, you need the people around you to remind you about who you are when you forget, and then also you just need to get through it, and then look back on it and say, I got through it. That's gonna happen again.

I'm gonna feel like this again. Probably gonna sign up to do this again next year, and I'm gonna feel the same exact way before I get on stage, but I'm gonna do it. And you did do great at it. Thank you.

We have time for one more. Anyone that you've won in particular? I don't have a preference. Okay, we'll go from the top then.

We're all moving and changing quickly that it can be so noisy to go through this over and over. Any advice for frequent change? I think you can make it fun. You can play around, like you can make games out of having to change a lot.

I think finding the value, right? Like thinking about what's in your control, and then thinking about it from the benefit standpoint is important, and it's so easy. We are negative creatures by nature. Our brain is gonna go to the negative first because we don't like change.

So being aware of that and then overriding it, forcing yourself to come up with some of the things that might be benefits as a result, and then just reminding yourself as you're going through it. Also, this is where growth happens, right? If you're not changing, you're not growing. And so what can you take out of this that benefits you?

You can play that game. We've had a lot of change from a corporate perspective. Not all of it is change we're driving. Not all of it is change that we're excited about in the beginning.

And so it's a matter of how do I pull from this experience, even if it's one I don't want, how do I get better because of it and in spite of it? And then you're in the game and you've got that benefit that you can look forward to. So you can play little games with yourself. We laugh a lot.

I love keeping everybody laughing through a tough moment, there's something to be said for that. But just remember to smile even if you don't feel like it and it'll make you feel better. Thank you so much Heather. Thank you.

Thank you. (audience applauding)