If you want to achieve something that you haven’t accomplished yet, you need to do something that you haven’t done before.

In other words, if you want to achieve something new, you have to go through change. Whether that is obtaining a promotion, starting your own business or expanding your company.

There are many reasons why we stop ourselves from going through change. One of the most important reasons is the lack of awareness on the emotional cycle of change. Published in 1979 by Don Kelley and Daryl Conner, the emotional cycle of change outlines our emotional response when going through change. By understanding this cycle, you are better able to anticipate your journey and go through change.

As a (future) leader, you will constantly be going through these cycles of change, when your responsibility within the company grows or when your business expands:

1. Uninformed Optimism

Emotionally, this is the most exciting stage; you are visualizing all results without experiencing the costs. This is where you strategize for the future and brainstorm about endless possibilities.

2. Informed Pessimism (doubt)

Uninformed optimism usually doesn’t last too long. As you face the reality of change, positive emotions start to convert into pessimism. The costs of change emerge and become clearly visible, whilst the benefits seem farther and farther away. At this change, you typically start to question yourself “is the change really worth the effort?”.

3. Valley of Despair

The third stage is the lowest emotional point of change; called the Valley of Despair. This is where many people give up, since they start to remember the easy life they had before initiating the change. The quickest way to abandon the valley of despair is by quitting.

Once you quit here, you’ll end up back at the first stage. Some of us find themselves stuck in the cycle between the first 3 stages, not willing or able to push through to the next stage.

4. Informed Optimism

You have made it through the Valley of Despair and you start to see the possibilities of your success. The benefits of your efforts are starting to pay off and the costs of change is feeling worth it. This is where you need to keep going.

5. Success

Success and fulfillment are in the final stage of the emotional cycle. At this point, your hard work has paid off and you experiencing the result as you had visualized. The efforts that were once discomfort have become a habit.

My Personal Journey

In my own journey, from employee to entrepreneur, there were 3 key elements that helped me to accelerate through change:

1. Knowing why am I doing this; having a crystal-clear idea on why I wanted to achieve it and how it added value to my life. Knowing my why created for me the urgency to do it now and helped me to persist in the face of obstacles. Knowing my why was most helpful for me to cross the Valley of Despair.
2. Making a wish list on what was needed to start my own business. This could be €50k savings, an additional education or a successful business mentor or all of the above. Once you have checked all the boxes of your wish list, there is no excuse for yourself to not do it.
3. Having a mentor who provided me with advice and functioned as my thinking partner. Whenever I seemed to be lost or were going off-track, he helped me to get back on track and keep pushing through change.

What helped you in going through change?