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Stephen Matini द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री Stephen Matini या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal
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Hold Up A Mirror to See Infinite Potential - Featuring Minola Jac

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Stephen Matini द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री Stephen Matini या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal

Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results.

My guest for this episode is Minola Jac, a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism.

Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte and is currently the Group Change and Organizational Lead for the Syngenta Group, whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity.

Minola believes that, too often, organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change entails and its impacts on people.

Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential.

Listen to the episode:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Podbean

Google Podcasts

Subscribe to Pity Party Over

Sign up for a complimentary Live Session

Contact Stephen Matini

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Leadership & Management Development

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: Hello everyone, I am Stephen, and welcome to Pity Party Over. Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results.

My guess for this episode is Minola Jac a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism. Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte, and is currently the group change and organizational lead for the Syngenta Group whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity.

Minola believes that too often organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change really entails and its impacts on people. Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential. Please welcome to Pity Party Over Minola Jac.

Stephen Matini: I read a nice quote from your LinkedIn profile that says, “The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size” by Einstein. Why did you choose that quote?

Minola Jac: Well, there's, there's a very long love story between Einstein and, and myself, and, and I will also share a fun fact that quote really resonates with me because I do a lot of change work. Some people call it change management. I prefer to call it change work and focus more on the change than on whether we call it management, leadership, agility or whatever.

I do believe that change starts in the mind and the moment you have a new idea or you connect new dots, or you connect existing dots in a new way, you cannot possibly un-connect them, and you cannot forget it. Maybe you forget the idea itself, but I do believe that at least you get that feeling with you. You know, that feeling of, oh!, you know, that, that surprise, and I dunno how you can un-live that or forget that. This is why I, I chose that quote.

It's very funny and it also links to, to change and, and how you hear things and you don't know whether you would ever use them again. A few years back, I was in a development program by my then employer, and we were in a workshop about the use of artificial intelligence in HR, and we had this wonderful trainer completely energized by everything AI.

It was very early days for Siri, and he said, look, Siri, imagine you're in a conversation with a client and you are in in their office, and you'll spot that they have a poster with Einstein. So definitely they're a huge Einstein fan, and when they step out for a moment, you are like, Siri, what's Einstein's birthday? And I raised my hand and he was like, yes? And I was like, March 14th, 1879. He said, you just killed Siri. And I'm like, I'm really sorry.

What I didn't share with him was that it so happens I was born precisely to the date 100 years after Einstein.

Stephen Matini: Oh, wow!

Minola Jac: You know, I had this information in the back of my mind for 20 something years since high school. And as we will probably go through our conversation today I can share more about the power of stories and how you can repurpose information in, in meaningful conversations.

Stephen Matini: How do use that in your job?

Minola Jac: I will give you an example, another example. I was flying from Tali to Istanbul a few years back, and it was in the middle of my flying phobia episode. I I went through a bad thunderstorm anyways, so I tried to think about something different than the flight and me being on an airplane. I, I started a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me, and it turned out he was flying back to his home country back to Egypt.

He had a business of exporting Arab pure breads like stallions, and he was flying back home from a tour across Europe. He was visiting locations where his horses would, you know, stop every now and again on their journey to their new owners in, in the northern countries of, of Europe.

And he told me that it takes about six to eight months for an Arabian pure bread to go from Egypt to their new owners. Because what happens every one and a half, two months, the horses go a little bit north and a little bit more north. And basically they get used and acclimatized to the weather, to the new nutrients in the food and water. And this is the safest way. So of course you can fly them, but then the risks of them developing, you know, diseases and, and you know, not getting used to the climate is very, very high.

And almost about a year ago, I was in a conversation with a key stakeholder on a project at work, and we were looking at the project milestones and the change journey, and there was a reaction of, I don't understand why is it taking so long? And I told him, I know that it's very impolite to answer a question with another question, but please bear with me.

Do you know why it take six to eight months for an Arabian pure bread to get safely from Egypt to Sweden? And then we started to talk about what it means for an organization to get, you know, acclimatized and to go through a process little by little, little by little. And of course, you can accelerate things, but then there are things that just take time

Stephen Matini: In your job, I would assume, you must deal with a lot of different people that had different energies and different expectations. How do you keep yourself graceful, centered and calm when dealing with all these people?

Minola Jac: Well, just just a disclaimer that, that there's a lot of aspirational room. You know, when talking about keeping oneself centered and, and graceful and, and I think we all have good days and bad days.

What I do believe makes the biggest difference is that even when we have bad days whatever behavioral question marks, we, we live in our interactions, they do not come from a place of ill intent. I think that that is the first disclaimer that I would make.

I read something many, many years ago. When you learn that how others behave towards you has everything to do with them and very little with you is anything, then you learn grace. That is something that I try to keep in mind. How I show up in interactions says everything about me and very little about others, and whatever it is that triggers me is about me.

What I learn quite painfully, so in my journey in both life and work is to protect me time. That's time. You know, when, when I really have conversations with myself and spend time with myself and I understand what I reacted to and where I didn't respond and where I didn't stop to, you know, take a deep breath or count to 10 or whatever it is that grounds me. I think a lot of grace to ourselves and others comes from this place of, of just curiosity, courage and compassion that we show others, but we also show ourselves.

Stephen Matini: What you just said is something that a lot of people struggle with, which is carving a space for themselves. And often times what I hear is, I'm so busy, I'm busy, busy, busy, busy, there's no time for myself. And also, what would happen to the relationship if I said no to this person, to my boss, to this and that? So how do you set boundaries essentially?

Minola Jac: Hmm. This is the moment in conversations when I like to quote Mike Tyson. He has this famous quote saying that we should all sit in meditation for 15 minutes a day, unless we are very busy, then we should sit for one full hour. I think that this carving time for, for ourselves should be just as intentional as is every, everything else.

One thing that really made a difference for me and in, in how I approach my boundaries is I understood that most of the time we think about conversations as something that happens outside of us with other people. We never think about conversations as something that we have with our own self. Who do I need to have a conversation with today? And if it's me, then I will protect that space just as gracefully and fearlessly as I protect my conversation spaces with other people. This is something that I embed in, in my work.

I will give you an example. One of my favorite exercises to run is the stakeholder analysis and mapping. And one thing that that I do is, you know, we talk about the principles and then we, we have a look at tools that might work for a particular team and a particular project.

And then we have this working space where they basically have fun with the tool and they start to list stakeholders and, and their engagement needs. And at the end of that exercise, I ask one simple question, how long does this list need to get before you list your own selves?

Stephen Matini: , that's beautiful.

Minola Jac: We're never that intentional about our own selves, whether personally or professionally as we are with everybody else. And we are, at the end of the day, our first line of of stakeholders.

Stephen Matini: You emphasize the importance really of being accountable. Our focus may, may be naturally go onto other people, we may see them as responsible, you know, for what happens to us. But the way you're speaking, it's all about, let's come back to ourself. Self-compassion, non-judgment, accountability. These are really important concepts to you. How did you get into this realm?

Minola Jac: Oh, by refusing to get into it for so many years, , I was put in, in, in situations where I had to learn to do this. I started noticing patterns, things that started to happen. And no matter how much I wanted to make other people accountable, the only common denominator in know in all those situations and to all those decisions was me.

So I kept making decisions and I kept reacting, and I kept taking action based on the same principles, expecting different results, . So yes, what that didn't happen! What helped me a lot was the fact that I traveled a lot because of work, because of life. I ended up with spending a lot of time on my own. And no matter how much I tried to push and pull other people into my own time, there were still, you know, at the airport, in taxi, on trains, you know, I mean, you can talk to strangers, but how much really?

So I couldn't escape myself basically. And, and I had to make friends with myself. And that comes with a lot of, you know, I I sometimes say that I have a love-hate relationship with myself. Have I grown more comfortable having these conversations? Yes. Are all those conversations comfortable? No. Are all those conversations comforting? Yes. I often times ask myself, how can I be present? Who are other people? If I am not present for myself, am I always the best of companies? Of course not, but at least I'm trying to.

Stephen Matini: Last time you pointed out the fact that a self-rejection is something that has given you a lot of insights. Would you mind telling me something more about this?

Minola Jac: Of course. I think I mentioned that a few years back, I was asked by, by an amazing friend of mine to give a talk on self-rejection. And I started that talk saying, hello, my name is Minola and I am a rejection subject matter expert. I think that's a different way of saying that we are our own harshest critic. We all develop that critic, that self critic because of different experiences.

If I look in, in, in my background, because I, I believe that we are accountable for both content and context and these two feed into an, into each other. So the context is, I was born and I grew up in communist Romania in a parenting era, you know, based on, oh, but what would people say? Yeah. Or what would people think? For some reason, my parents were of the conviction that, you know, good is there and, and it's self-explanatory, but we should always point out the development areas. Yeah.

So I, I got a lot of constructive and developmental feedback growing up because what would people say? My sense of identity came from being validated by others. I learned that a lot of self-rejection comes from never unlearning things that we absorb from other people. We grow up learning what work is, we grow up learning what expectations are. We grow up learning that we are expected to be in a certain way and not often enough we go back and challenge those and unlearn those expectations.

There's a wonderful, wonderful quote from Muhammad Ali. He said that it's not the mountain ahead that wears you down. It's the pebble in your shoe. And I think this is how we grow our self-rejection. We accumulate pebbles that have nothing to do with us, and we never stop, shake our shoes and our sock and move on.

Stephen Matini: How did you get into organizational development? Why you chose this specific route for yourself?

Minola Jac: By accident ? Yeah, I think the best things in life happen by, by accident or they happen when, when you don't bite it and you don't question it, you, you just feel that that is where life takes you.

I'm a journalist by trade. I worked for many years as a journalist, and it so happened that I used to write quite a lot for HR and HR services column, and this is how I got a taste of the HR world. And then when I left journalism, I, I ended up doing communication work and, and PR work, and somehow I ended up doing that for HR services companies.

Little by little, I just fell in love with this world. I grew into corporate consulting after doing corporate affairs and corporate sales jobs and organizational development, but mostly the change work around organizational development just called my name. And I often times say that journalism for me was the best school for doing this because it's about triangulating information. It's about really understanding that it's about how you create value for other people, especially people who do not have access to the same information that you have.

So how do you create meaning? How do you tell stories? How do you create those stories? And I think what really fascinates me about doing change and organizational development work is how do you open people's minds to new ideas so that they will never go back to their previous forum?

Stephen Matini: The concept of self-rejection. Do you see it in your work, when you work with teams, with people. Do you actually see it playing a role in the organizational dynamics?

Minola Jac: I actually do. And whether that's resistance to change or whether that has really bad experience or whether that comes because people, for one reason or another, they, they are on a journey where they're energy and focus are, are being completely purposed somewhere else, and they just feel like they cannot deal with anything else or anything different at, at that moment in time.

I think organizational self-rejection is not fundamentally different than the personal self-rejection. And I think it, it comes down to, to really keeping an open mind and sometimes even more importantly what I call an open heart.

Probably you heard me saying saying this before, but one of my favorite quotes is that the universe falls in love with a stubborn heart. And I believe that there is a limit to our rational being, but I think there is no limit to our emotional being. And if you really feel strongly about something in your core, your mind will find a solution if it's important enough to you.

So I think self-rejection also comes from seeing things around us and perceiving them as transactional or corrective. And then it's like, okay, if if I don't have a problem, I cannot use them to expand the mind either. So I think self-rejection is not just about feeling like we cannot do something, but also feeling that we cannot do something else or different with, with what we have.

Stephen Matini: Which term would you use to indicate the opposite of self-rejection?

Minola Jac: Oh, curiosity. I would use curiosity. And, and for some reason, I, I, I got into this reflex of always using curiosity with courage and compassion. I think these three, they should come together.

There is a, an exercise i, I run every now and again with teams that I work with in a, in an icebreaker. And there's a set of questions. And one question that I love to ask is, if change didn't exist as a word in our vocabulary, what would you use to get the same meaning? These three, they, they come up, you know, curiosity, courage and, and compassion. I think these three also used with self-curiosity, self-courage, and self-compassion. These to me are the exact and total antonyms of of self-rejection.

Stephen Matini: Last time when you, I talked, you said something that I wrote down, you said that we focus on the management aspect or change management without fully understanding what change entails.

Minola Jac: Yeah, that's that's what I call my personal and professional crusade, to really break this label of change management. Because what happens and, and I see in, in almost all conversations without exception, is that because we want to make sense of things and we want to gain control, then we focus very, very quickly on the management part, and we don't sit in change long enough or with open mind and open heart.

And there is this promise made by all the frameworks, methodologies, and, and tools out there that if you follow a process, if you implement tools, and if you go through 27 steps or 8 phases or you know, 91 Excel spreadsheets, then it's done. For example, I'm absolutely fascinated how there are conversations saying, oh, it's not change management, it's change leadership, or it's change agility, or it's changed something or another when actually it's change!

Yeah, we are just trying to package it differently. What I keep saying is that we should not over rely on methodologies and tools and frameworks. Those are absolutely wonderful when we have a better understanding of what change is.

I just had this idea in a, in a very recent conversation that why do people react to change in a more resistant way or they perceive it more disruptive when it happens within the organization, when in our lives we deal with change constantly. But I think what makes the difference, if I look at my own experiences as well, when it happens in our lives, we don't wrap it up in this change management process driven tool over reliant way.

Yeah, we do stakeholder management and, and engagement. We do have communication strategy and plan, but in life, we don't call it our change management framework, we call it, I don't know, surviving the holidays with your in-laws. That's, that's huge stakeholder engagement effort. At the same time, I'm, I'm thinking that change management in, in organizations, you know, they, it hits very close to what gives us safety and security and it's very disruptive.

I would really invite everybody stay a little bit longer in change. Don't rush into the management part of it because then it becomes transactional, it becomes correctional. You don't bring in change management just to correct things. We could use change management to create horizons.

Stephen Matini: I've been going to therapy for one year, and has been a phenomenal experience, with this incredible therapist. Is a she. So we talked about a million things. And the one thing that somehow kept happening every single time is no matter what challenge I was discussing with her, somehow the conversation always end up by talking, this is life.

There's nothing particularly anything wrong about how you reacted to it. There's nothing particularly special, so to speak about that event which had an impact in your, in your life, but this is life. A life needs to be lived. And it seems to be the most, the, the simplest thing to say. And the intention was not to undermine obviously my, my struggle, whatever, I was going through it, but somehow it normalized everything.

You know, it went from thinking, this is wrong. It should be different. I should not be feeling this way. I should not be doing this way to, this is the path, you know, this is the journey actually, and what I learned from them makes all the difference.

Minola Jac: I totally love this and, and I'm very grateful that you opened this avenue of conversation. I am a huge believer in therapy and how it helped, helped me in many points of my journey even now, is that it taught me the value of creating judgment free spaces.

This is a trap, I think that many individuals and many organizations fall into. Creating these binary judgment systems. Is it right or is it wrong? Is it it forward or is it backwards? Is it good or is it bad? Is it efficient or is it inefficient? And I think that having a very polarized way of looking at things, that creates a lot of resistance to change. Because if it's not one way, it's the other and not a lot of many, many different ways in between.

I think that going through therapy in a truly mindful and intentional way is life and work changing. I do believe that if there is one principle from therapy that we can all implement in life and work equally is to create these spaces of safe spaces of no judgment where we can truly say it is what it is, and we are who we are. And things are not binary. Life is not binary. The only binary thing about life is that it starts with a birth and it ends with the other end. But that's the only binary thing about life really.

Stephen Matini: And maybe that's not binary either. , who knows?

Minola Jac: Who knows

Stephen Matini: You are talking about the importance of creating a space in which someone can simply be. It's really, it's a magic that we, that we can do as humans to other humans. And so based on that, and anything that comes to mind, when you have a manager let's say, or a director, whatever the person is, I don't know if it ever happened to you, that asks you doing some sort of you know, change in moments in the organization, how should I deal with this team, with this person who's experiencing resistance to change? Because unfortunately, often times in organizations everything is transactional. You know, they have a deadline, certain things have to happen by a certain time. Based on your experience, what would you recommend to anyone in order to help someone who's struggling through a moment of change?

Minola Jac: For me, the the key is always understanding where that resistance to change comes from. And even more importantly, what does that resistance to change try to protect? What I want to make very clear from very early on in this conversation, I believe that there is huge value in understanding the resistance, the change. And I believe that any resistance to change ultimately is there to protect something that might be worth preserving.

One of the most underrated and underutilized questions in change work is what do we need to preserve? And a lot of immensely valuable answers to what we need to preserve comes from understanding the resistance to change. And there are several reasons why, why people resist change. Oftentimes it's because they have no clarity. Oftentimes it's because what is in front is so unclear and undefined yet that their only comfort is hanging on to the reality that they know, even if they are fully aware that that reality is not okay.

That is one, I think it comes with a lot of underestimating the sense of grief and loss that comes with any change, no matter how positive that change really is, whether it's a loss of safety, whether it's a loss of political capital. Yeah. Whether it's a loss of this new change being a judgment made on a previous project, the judgment is all that that project was not okay, and we need to make a change.

Really understand what that resistance talks about. Is it lack of clarity? Is it lack of understanding? Is it lack of being seen and heard and recognized and comforted, lack of being listened to. Again, I strongly believe that resistance to change is not exclusively a bad thing and it's not exclusively a thing that needs to be managed. I think it is definitely something that has to be understood.

Also, since you asked about resistance to change, there's the fascinating conversation around taking Lean Six Sigma thinking and overlapping it with change management and looking at what are the wastes in change management. Focusing, over focusing, obsessively, focusing on resistance to change is one.

The other one is not focusing on over enthusiasm. That's also not okay for doing change work because that comes with overselling and that ultimately comes with a lot of clarifying and re-contracting expectations. And if people have this huge idea and huge expectation, when you bring them back to reality, then you have resistance to change because they feel that they already lost something.

Stephen Matini: In many years that I work in organizational development, it never happened to me to find someone, a participant that did not have something interesting to say. You know, some people are easier to work with, and some people are more, maybe more pleasant. Some people, you know, energetically can be, I don't know, it's just a little bit harder. But nevertheless, I've always been surprised to see the amount of contributions and ideas that people come up with. And when you ask them what you think about this, you know, how would you do that? And the critical point is often whether or not those ideas eventually are going to be heard, are going to find, you know, enough space to be heard. And that's really the critical moment. But people always contribute. People always have ideas on how to navigate their change, you know, for the perspective or their experiences.

Minola Jac: I remember when, when we spoke a little while ago, you also asked me, how do I make my voice heard? I was actually thinking about that question a lot because that question oftentimes, you know, surfaces like my line manager or my sponsor or my senior stakeholders, they are not listening to me.

How do I make my voice heard as I was walking over the weekend, I was thinking, is it about making your voice heard or is it about making your voice listened to? I was in a, in a recent workshop, we were speaking about one of my favorite quotes with two monologues who not make a dialogue. I don't think that we should aim at having our voice heard as much as we should aim at having our voice listened to. We should never go into a conversation only having in mind what we have to say.

I think the outcome is really understanding what people hear and what people understand. Whenever I'm asked, how do I make my voice heard, my immediate question is, what do people that you want to communicate with listen to? How do they listen? What do they pay attention to? And one of the examples, one of the stories that I share is the one about Scheherazade and the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

If her focus had been just on telling stories, we would probably have had one , one Arabian night. But she made her voice listened to, not just heard, she knew what the sultan would be listening to. She knew what the sultan’s listening was triggered by. She knew that the sultan’s behavior came from being you know, hurt in love, aren’t we all? Before you make your voice heard, understand what people are most likely to listen to, and then use that information to tell your own story.

Stephen Matini: And in doing that, she was able to preserve her life.

Minola Jac: Exactly. An an amazing change intervention, sustainable change intervention!

Stephen Matini: If you had to say, what is the, the one thing, the main thing of our conversation, what would you say it is?

Minola Jac: It's this invitation for everybody listening to us to really think how long do they list whatever lists need to get before they list themselves.

If there is one thing that I am very thankful for is understanding that whatever it is that I do in life or work, it comes with a mirror that first and foremost, we have to look into it. We understand, you know, how accurately it reflects back.

I think organizational development is about holding up a mirror so that people can see their potential and not their flaws. I think change work comes with the same way. You know, when, when people look at the mirror of their hopes and dreams and, and the ideas that will change their minds forever. This is, I believe what I take with me from this conversation.

Stephen Matini: My wish for people is sooner leader to have the chance to spend some time with you, , because when you hold the mirror, you, you see beauty. So thank you so much, Minola, this is wonderful. Thank you.

Minola Jac: Thank you Stephen. Thank you.

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Stephen Matini द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री Stephen Matini या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal

Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results.

My guest for this episode is Minola Jac, a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism.

Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte and is currently the Group Change and Organizational Lead for the Syngenta Group, whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity.

Minola believes that, too often, organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change entails and its impacts on people.

Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential.

Listen to the episode:

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Podbean

Google Podcasts

Subscribe to Pity Party Over

Sign up for a complimentary Live Session

Contact Stephen Matini

Connect with Stephen Matini

Leadership & Management Development

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: Hello everyone, I am Stephen, and welcome to Pity Party Over. Organizations often view change as something to manage, an unfortunate and inevitable inconvenience that gets in the way of solid performance and results.

My guess for this episode is Minola Jac a transformational business professional whose background combines consulting, organizational development, and journalism. Minola has worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte, and is currently the group change and organizational lead for the Syngenta Group whose mission is reducing emissions and improving biodiversity.

Minola believes that too often organizations focus predominantly on change management without fully understanding what change really entails and its impacts on people. Minola highlights the transformative power of the change process to become a metaphorical mirror in which people can see their infinite potential. Please welcome to Pity Party Over Minola Jac.

Stephen Matini: I read a nice quote from your LinkedIn profile that says, “The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size” by Einstein. Why did you choose that quote?

Minola Jac: Well, there's, there's a very long love story between Einstein and, and myself, and, and I will also share a fun fact that quote really resonates with me because I do a lot of change work. Some people call it change management. I prefer to call it change work and focus more on the change than on whether we call it management, leadership, agility or whatever.

I do believe that change starts in the mind and the moment you have a new idea or you connect new dots, or you connect existing dots in a new way, you cannot possibly un-connect them, and you cannot forget it. Maybe you forget the idea itself, but I do believe that at least you get that feeling with you. You know, that feeling of, oh!, you know, that, that surprise, and I dunno how you can un-live that or forget that. This is why I, I chose that quote.

It's very funny and it also links to, to change and, and how you hear things and you don't know whether you would ever use them again. A few years back, I was in a development program by my then employer, and we were in a workshop about the use of artificial intelligence in HR, and we had this wonderful trainer completely energized by everything AI.

It was very early days for Siri, and he said, look, Siri, imagine you're in a conversation with a client and you are in in their office, and you'll spot that they have a poster with Einstein. So definitely they're a huge Einstein fan, and when they step out for a moment, you are like, Siri, what's Einstein's birthday? And I raised my hand and he was like, yes? And I was like, March 14th, 1879. He said, you just killed Siri. And I'm like, I'm really sorry.

What I didn't share with him was that it so happens I was born precisely to the date 100 years after Einstein.

Stephen Matini: Oh, wow!

Minola Jac: You know, I had this information in the back of my mind for 20 something years since high school. And as we will probably go through our conversation today I can share more about the power of stories and how you can repurpose information in, in meaningful conversations.

Stephen Matini: How do use that in your job?

Minola Jac: I will give you an example, another example. I was flying from Tali to Istanbul a few years back, and it was in the middle of my flying phobia episode. I I went through a bad thunderstorm anyways, so I tried to think about something different than the flight and me being on an airplane. I, I started a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me, and it turned out he was flying back to his home country back to Egypt.

He had a business of exporting Arab pure breads like stallions, and he was flying back home from a tour across Europe. He was visiting locations where his horses would, you know, stop every now and again on their journey to their new owners in, in the northern countries of, of Europe.

And he told me that it takes about six to eight months for an Arabian pure bread to go from Egypt to their new owners. Because what happens every one and a half, two months, the horses go a little bit north and a little bit more north. And basically they get used and acclimatized to the weather, to the new nutrients in the food and water. And this is the safest way. So of course you can fly them, but then the risks of them developing, you know, diseases and, and you know, not getting used to the climate is very, very high.

And almost about a year ago, I was in a conversation with a key stakeholder on a project at work, and we were looking at the project milestones and the change journey, and there was a reaction of, I don't understand why is it taking so long? And I told him, I know that it's very impolite to answer a question with another question, but please bear with me.

Do you know why it take six to eight months for an Arabian pure bread to get safely from Egypt to Sweden? And then we started to talk about what it means for an organization to get, you know, acclimatized and to go through a process little by little, little by little. And of course, you can accelerate things, but then there are things that just take time

Stephen Matini: In your job, I would assume, you must deal with a lot of different people that had different energies and different expectations. How do you keep yourself graceful, centered and calm when dealing with all these people?

Minola Jac: Well, just just a disclaimer that, that there's a lot of aspirational room. You know, when talking about keeping oneself centered and, and graceful and, and I think we all have good days and bad days.

What I do believe makes the biggest difference is that even when we have bad days whatever behavioral question marks, we, we live in our interactions, they do not come from a place of ill intent. I think that that is the first disclaimer that I would make.

I read something many, many years ago. When you learn that how others behave towards you has everything to do with them and very little with you is anything, then you learn grace. That is something that I try to keep in mind. How I show up in interactions says everything about me and very little about others, and whatever it is that triggers me is about me.

What I learn quite painfully, so in my journey in both life and work is to protect me time. That's time. You know, when, when I really have conversations with myself and spend time with myself and I understand what I reacted to and where I didn't respond and where I didn't stop to, you know, take a deep breath or count to 10 or whatever it is that grounds me. I think a lot of grace to ourselves and others comes from this place of, of just curiosity, courage and compassion that we show others, but we also show ourselves.

Stephen Matini: What you just said is something that a lot of people struggle with, which is carving a space for themselves. And often times what I hear is, I'm so busy, I'm busy, busy, busy, busy, there's no time for myself. And also, what would happen to the relationship if I said no to this person, to my boss, to this and that? So how do you set boundaries essentially?

Minola Jac: Hmm. This is the moment in conversations when I like to quote Mike Tyson. He has this famous quote saying that we should all sit in meditation for 15 minutes a day, unless we are very busy, then we should sit for one full hour. I think that this carving time for, for ourselves should be just as intentional as is every, everything else.

One thing that really made a difference for me and in, in how I approach my boundaries is I understood that most of the time we think about conversations as something that happens outside of us with other people. We never think about conversations as something that we have with our own self. Who do I need to have a conversation with today? And if it's me, then I will protect that space just as gracefully and fearlessly as I protect my conversation spaces with other people. This is something that I embed in, in my work.

I will give you an example. One of my favorite exercises to run is the stakeholder analysis and mapping. And one thing that that I do is, you know, we talk about the principles and then we, we have a look at tools that might work for a particular team and a particular project.

And then we have this working space where they basically have fun with the tool and they start to list stakeholders and, and their engagement needs. And at the end of that exercise, I ask one simple question, how long does this list need to get before you list your own selves?

Stephen Matini: , that's beautiful.

Minola Jac: We're never that intentional about our own selves, whether personally or professionally as we are with everybody else. And we are, at the end of the day, our first line of of stakeholders.

Stephen Matini: You emphasize the importance really of being accountable. Our focus may, may be naturally go onto other people, we may see them as responsible, you know, for what happens to us. But the way you're speaking, it's all about, let's come back to ourself. Self-compassion, non-judgment, accountability. These are really important concepts to you. How did you get into this realm?

Minola Jac: Oh, by refusing to get into it for so many years, , I was put in, in, in situations where I had to learn to do this. I started noticing patterns, things that started to happen. And no matter how much I wanted to make other people accountable, the only common denominator in know in all those situations and to all those decisions was me.

So I kept making decisions and I kept reacting, and I kept taking action based on the same principles, expecting different results, . So yes, what that didn't happen! What helped me a lot was the fact that I traveled a lot because of work, because of life. I ended up with spending a lot of time on my own. And no matter how much I tried to push and pull other people into my own time, there were still, you know, at the airport, in taxi, on trains, you know, I mean, you can talk to strangers, but how much really?

So I couldn't escape myself basically. And, and I had to make friends with myself. And that comes with a lot of, you know, I I sometimes say that I have a love-hate relationship with myself. Have I grown more comfortable having these conversations? Yes. Are all those conversations comfortable? No. Are all those conversations comforting? Yes. I often times ask myself, how can I be present? Who are other people? If I am not present for myself, am I always the best of companies? Of course not, but at least I'm trying to.

Stephen Matini: Last time you pointed out the fact that a self-rejection is something that has given you a lot of insights. Would you mind telling me something more about this?

Minola Jac: Of course. I think I mentioned that a few years back, I was asked by, by an amazing friend of mine to give a talk on self-rejection. And I started that talk saying, hello, my name is Minola and I am a rejection subject matter expert. I think that's a different way of saying that we are our own harshest critic. We all develop that critic, that self critic because of different experiences.

If I look in, in, in my background, because I, I believe that we are accountable for both content and context and these two feed into an, into each other. So the context is, I was born and I grew up in communist Romania in a parenting era, you know, based on, oh, but what would people say? Yeah. Or what would people think? For some reason, my parents were of the conviction that, you know, good is there and, and it's self-explanatory, but we should always point out the development areas. Yeah.

So I, I got a lot of constructive and developmental feedback growing up because what would people say? My sense of identity came from being validated by others. I learned that a lot of self-rejection comes from never unlearning things that we absorb from other people. We grow up learning what work is, we grow up learning what expectations are. We grow up learning that we are expected to be in a certain way and not often enough we go back and challenge those and unlearn those expectations.

There's a wonderful, wonderful quote from Muhammad Ali. He said that it's not the mountain ahead that wears you down. It's the pebble in your shoe. And I think this is how we grow our self-rejection. We accumulate pebbles that have nothing to do with us, and we never stop, shake our shoes and our sock and move on.

Stephen Matini: How did you get into organizational development? Why you chose this specific route for yourself?

Minola Jac: By accident ? Yeah, I think the best things in life happen by, by accident or they happen when, when you don't bite it and you don't question it, you, you just feel that that is where life takes you.

I'm a journalist by trade. I worked for many years as a journalist, and it so happened that I used to write quite a lot for HR and HR services column, and this is how I got a taste of the HR world. And then when I left journalism, I, I ended up doing communication work and, and PR work, and somehow I ended up doing that for HR services companies.

Little by little, I just fell in love with this world. I grew into corporate consulting after doing corporate affairs and corporate sales jobs and organizational development, but mostly the change work around organizational development just called my name. And I often times say that journalism for me was the best school for doing this because it's about triangulating information. It's about really understanding that it's about how you create value for other people, especially people who do not have access to the same information that you have.

So how do you create meaning? How do you tell stories? How do you create those stories? And I think what really fascinates me about doing change and organizational development work is how do you open people's minds to new ideas so that they will never go back to their previous forum?

Stephen Matini: The concept of self-rejection. Do you see it in your work, when you work with teams, with people. Do you actually see it playing a role in the organizational dynamics?

Minola Jac: I actually do. And whether that's resistance to change or whether that has really bad experience or whether that comes because people, for one reason or another, they, they are on a journey where they're energy and focus are, are being completely purposed somewhere else, and they just feel like they cannot deal with anything else or anything different at, at that moment in time.

I think organizational self-rejection is not fundamentally different than the personal self-rejection. And I think it, it comes down to, to really keeping an open mind and sometimes even more importantly what I call an open heart.

Probably you heard me saying saying this before, but one of my favorite quotes is that the universe falls in love with a stubborn heart. And I believe that there is a limit to our rational being, but I think there is no limit to our emotional being. And if you really feel strongly about something in your core, your mind will find a solution if it's important enough to you.

So I think self-rejection also comes from seeing things around us and perceiving them as transactional or corrective. And then it's like, okay, if if I don't have a problem, I cannot use them to expand the mind either. So I think self-rejection is not just about feeling like we cannot do something, but also feeling that we cannot do something else or different with, with what we have.

Stephen Matini: Which term would you use to indicate the opposite of self-rejection?

Minola Jac: Oh, curiosity. I would use curiosity. And, and for some reason, I, I, I got into this reflex of always using curiosity with courage and compassion. I think these three, they should come together.

There is a, an exercise i, I run every now and again with teams that I work with in a, in an icebreaker. And there's a set of questions. And one question that I love to ask is, if change didn't exist as a word in our vocabulary, what would you use to get the same meaning? These three, they, they come up, you know, curiosity, courage and, and compassion. I think these three also used with self-curiosity, self-courage, and self-compassion. These to me are the exact and total antonyms of of self-rejection.

Stephen Matini: Last time when you, I talked, you said something that I wrote down, you said that we focus on the management aspect or change management without fully understanding what change entails.

Minola Jac: Yeah, that's that's what I call my personal and professional crusade, to really break this label of change management. Because what happens and, and I see in, in almost all conversations without exception, is that because we want to make sense of things and we want to gain control, then we focus very, very quickly on the management part, and we don't sit in change long enough or with open mind and open heart.

And there is this promise made by all the frameworks, methodologies, and, and tools out there that if you follow a process, if you implement tools, and if you go through 27 steps or 8 phases or you know, 91 Excel spreadsheets, then it's done. For example, I'm absolutely fascinated how there are conversations saying, oh, it's not change management, it's change leadership, or it's change agility, or it's changed something or another when actually it's change!

Yeah, we are just trying to package it differently. What I keep saying is that we should not over rely on methodologies and tools and frameworks. Those are absolutely wonderful when we have a better understanding of what change is.

I just had this idea in a, in a very recent conversation that why do people react to change in a more resistant way or they perceive it more disruptive when it happens within the organization, when in our lives we deal with change constantly. But I think what makes the difference, if I look at my own experiences as well, when it happens in our lives, we don't wrap it up in this change management process driven tool over reliant way.

Yeah, we do stakeholder management and, and engagement. We do have communication strategy and plan, but in life, we don't call it our change management framework, we call it, I don't know, surviving the holidays with your in-laws. That's, that's huge stakeholder engagement effort. At the same time, I'm, I'm thinking that change management in, in organizations, you know, they, it hits very close to what gives us safety and security and it's very disruptive.

I would really invite everybody stay a little bit longer in change. Don't rush into the management part of it because then it becomes transactional, it becomes correctional. You don't bring in change management just to correct things. We could use change management to create horizons.

Stephen Matini: I've been going to therapy for one year, and has been a phenomenal experience, with this incredible therapist. Is a she. So we talked about a million things. And the one thing that somehow kept happening every single time is no matter what challenge I was discussing with her, somehow the conversation always end up by talking, this is life.

There's nothing particularly anything wrong about how you reacted to it. There's nothing particularly special, so to speak about that event which had an impact in your, in your life, but this is life. A life needs to be lived. And it seems to be the most, the, the simplest thing to say. And the intention was not to undermine obviously my, my struggle, whatever, I was going through it, but somehow it normalized everything.

You know, it went from thinking, this is wrong. It should be different. I should not be feeling this way. I should not be doing this way to, this is the path, you know, this is the journey actually, and what I learned from them makes all the difference.

Minola Jac: I totally love this and, and I'm very grateful that you opened this avenue of conversation. I am a huge believer in therapy and how it helped, helped me in many points of my journey even now, is that it taught me the value of creating judgment free spaces.

This is a trap, I think that many individuals and many organizations fall into. Creating these binary judgment systems. Is it right or is it wrong? Is it it forward or is it backwards? Is it good or is it bad? Is it efficient or is it inefficient? And I think that having a very polarized way of looking at things, that creates a lot of resistance to change. Because if it's not one way, it's the other and not a lot of many, many different ways in between.

I think that going through therapy in a truly mindful and intentional way is life and work changing. I do believe that if there is one principle from therapy that we can all implement in life and work equally is to create these spaces of safe spaces of no judgment where we can truly say it is what it is, and we are who we are. And things are not binary. Life is not binary. The only binary thing about life is that it starts with a birth and it ends with the other end. But that's the only binary thing about life really.

Stephen Matini: And maybe that's not binary either. , who knows?

Minola Jac: Who knows

Stephen Matini: You are talking about the importance of creating a space in which someone can simply be. It's really, it's a magic that we, that we can do as humans to other humans. And so based on that, and anything that comes to mind, when you have a manager let's say, or a director, whatever the person is, I don't know if it ever happened to you, that asks you doing some sort of you know, change in moments in the organization, how should I deal with this team, with this person who's experiencing resistance to change? Because unfortunately, often times in organizations everything is transactional. You know, they have a deadline, certain things have to happen by a certain time. Based on your experience, what would you recommend to anyone in order to help someone who's struggling through a moment of change?

Minola Jac: For me, the the key is always understanding where that resistance to change comes from. And even more importantly, what does that resistance to change try to protect? What I want to make very clear from very early on in this conversation, I believe that there is huge value in understanding the resistance, the change. And I believe that any resistance to change ultimately is there to protect something that might be worth preserving.

One of the most underrated and underutilized questions in change work is what do we need to preserve? And a lot of immensely valuable answers to what we need to preserve comes from understanding the resistance to change. And there are several reasons why, why people resist change. Oftentimes it's because they have no clarity. Oftentimes it's because what is in front is so unclear and undefined yet that their only comfort is hanging on to the reality that they know, even if they are fully aware that that reality is not okay.

That is one, I think it comes with a lot of underestimating the sense of grief and loss that comes with any change, no matter how positive that change really is, whether it's a loss of safety, whether it's a loss of political capital. Yeah. Whether it's a loss of this new change being a judgment made on a previous project, the judgment is all that that project was not okay, and we need to make a change.

Really understand what that resistance talks about. Is it lack of clarity? Is it lack of understanding? Is it lack of being seen and heard and recognized and comforted, lack of being listened to. Again, I strongly believe that resistance to change is not exclusively a bad thing and it's not exclusively a thing that needs to be managed. I think it is definitely something that has to be understood.

Also, since you asked about resistance to change, there's the fascinating conversation around taking Lean Six Sigma thinking and overlapping it with change management and looking at what are the wastes in change management. Focusing, over focusing, obsessively, focusing on resistance to change is one.

The other one is not focusing on over enthusiasm. That's also not okay for doing change work because that comes with overselling and that ultimately comes with a lot of clarifying and re-contracting expectations. And if people have this huge idea and huge expectation, when you bring them back to reality, then you have resistance to change because they feel that they already lost something.

Stephen Matini: In many years that I work in organizational development, it never happened to me to find someone, a participant that did not have something interesting to say. You know, some people are easier to work with, and some people are more, maybe more pleasant. Some people, you know, energetically can be, I don't know, it's just a little bit harder. But nevertheless, I've always been surprised to see the amount of contributions and ideas that people come up with. And when you ask them what you think about this, you know, how would you do that? And the critical point is often whether or not those ideas eventually are going to be heard, are going to find, you know, enough space to be heard. And that's really the critical moment. But people always contribute. People always have ideas on how to navigate their change, you know, for the perspective or their experiences.

Minola Jac: I remember when, when we spoke a little while ago, you also asked me, how do I make my voice heard? I was actually thinking about that question a lot because that question oftentimes, you know, surfaces like my line manager or my sponsor or my senior stakeholders, they are not listening to me.

How do I make my voice heard as I was walking over the weekend, I was thinking, is it about making your voice heard or is it about making your voice listened to? I was in a, in a recent workshop, we were speaking about one of my favorite quotes with two monologues who not make a dialogue. I don't think that we should aim at having our voice heard as much as we should aim at having our voice listened to. We should never go into a conversation only having in mind what we have to say.

I think the outcome is really understanding what people hear and what people understand. Whenever I'm asked, how do I make my voice heard, my immediate question is, what do people that you want to communicate with listen to? How do they listen? What do they pay attention to? And one of the examples, one of the stories that I share is the one about Scheherazade and the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

If her focus had been just on telling stories, we would probably have had one , one Arabian night. But she made her voice listened to, not just heard, she knew what the sultan would be listening to. She knew what the sultan’s listening was triggered by. She knew that the sultan’s behavior came from being you know, hurt in love, aren’t we all? Before you make your voice heard, understand what people are most likely to listen to, and then use that information to tell your own story.

Stephen Matini: And in doing that, she was able to preserve her life.

Minola Jac: Exactly. An an amazing change intervention, sustainable change intervention!

Stephen Matini: If you had to say, what is the, the one thing, the main thing of our conversation, what would you say it is?

Minola Jac: It's this invitation for everybody listening to us to really think how long do they list whatever lists need to get before they list themselves.

If there is one thing that I am very thankful for is understanding that whatever it is that I do in life or work, it comes with a mirror that first and foremost, we have to look into it. We understand, you know, how accurately it reflects back.

I think organizational development is about holding up a mirror so that people can see their potential and not their flaws. I think change work comes with the same way. You know, when, when people look at the mirror of their hopes and dreams and, and the ideas that will change their minds forever. This is, I believe what I take with me from this conversation.

Stephen Matini: My wish for people is sooner leader to have the chance to spend some time with you, , because when you hold the mirror, you, you see beauty. So thank you so much, Minola, this is wonderful. Thank you.

Minola Jac: Thank you Stephen. Thank you.

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