This post was shared by Ana Polanco – faculty of the Executive Certificate in Organization Development Consulting & Change Leadership in the Institute for Transformational Leadership. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 2/3/22. 

You are more than a mind and a physical body, you are also made of energy that is ready to be activated.

Each layer of energy that makes up your body is important to activating a deeper version of your true self. The energy body stores your most important relationships and histories. In this body, we can see whether you are connected or disconnected from your purpose.

How you interact with the world on any given day is only a fraction of the expression of your energy. Each layer of your energy body has a particular vibration and role that occupies its own size, shape, and vibration to make up your being. As we do the work to disentangle ourselves from the external and material world, care for our being must take precedence over doing.

When you’re initiating into your purpose, your dreams, and your desires, a major part of this work is about expanding energetically. Taking up more space with your energy begins by locating and frequently activating the parts of yourself that are silent and subtle.

What parts of you have you ignored or pushed away in order to please the outside world? 

This is the time to really get quiet and still to listen to those parts, to give them more of a front seat in your navigation system. Bringing awareness to your innermost parts through somatic practices requires repetition, consistently centering the sensations of your body for a cumulative effect. The more often you connect to your energetic body, the easier it becomes to access these parts that want to help you become even more embodied.

Many people get caught up when accessing these innermost feelings around not being what we imagine ourselves to be in the current moment. There is often a gap in our minds between where we are currently, and where we think or have been told we should be. Energy work allows us to begin accepting where we are at this time so we can begin calling back the version of ourselves we aspire to be.

Your energy is larger than all the collective things you have or do, so it has the capacity to bring you back into a right relationship with yourself and the world around you as well.

Binary thinking about how we access new information about ourselves in the “modern” world would have us think less of the intuitive ways our body signals to us. Yet when we look at civilizations of the past, we see their energy practices woven into the fabric of their culture.

Ancient Egyptians practiced Sekhem, similar to Reiki but using a different frequency. Qi Gong is a practice used by Buddhists to align breath, movement, and awareness. Indigenous cultures of the Americas often used temazcal (sweat lodges) as tools to access energy and histories of our collective and individual bodies. These are just some examples of ancestral practices that use somatic techniques as a means of connecting to and amplifying our internal energy fields.

Returning to the ancestral wisdom around us and within us is where we will find deeper layers of strength to change ourselves.

Moving into the body’s energy fields isn’t a microwaveable strategy.

Working with your energy is about making space for new habits to form. As you begin to do energy work, you will feel more like yourself and also less interested in the distractions the world presents. When the energy work builds we can leverage the mind to make conscious choices to engage our life’s work, and then allow the body and its energy fields to take the lead.

Learning to hear ourselves and center our intuition opens our own doors of acceptance. In our path of accessing purpose, inner acceptance is invaluable in letting the societal baggage fall away.

When you feel your body intuitively light up – when you smell a particular scent that activates a memory, when you feel deja vu, when you see some kind of visual pattern – don’t ignore those sensations. Those moments are the activation of your energetic body, calling you with information to offer you guidance. Creating space for yourself to listen and answer its call will open your world to the possibility residing within your own being.

Ana Polanco teaches in Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership (ITL). In ITL’s Organization Development Consulting and Change Leadership (ODCCL) program, we explore how to support change efforts, as organizational leaders and as an external consultants. If you would like to be part of a community of professionals committed to helping organizations and people thrive, consider joining our next cohort.  Applications are due FEBRUARY 15^th.

This post was shared by Robert Devlin – faculty of the Executive Certificate in Organization Development Consulting & Change Leadership in the Institute for Transformational Leadership.

“We’ve invested untold hours and big budgets to address what we heard in our employee survey and people are still saying that nothing ever changes around here.”

Sound familiar?  Sometimes even when leaders take action to make things better, their efforts go unnoticed, or the impact is not what they hoped for. From a workforce point of view, the story is: ‘nothing ever changes … tomorrow will be harder than today … it’s wearing me out … maybe I’ll go somewhere else …’ and so the cycle continues.

To avoid this scenario and build some good will with your most precious resource – your workforce — consider the following principles when planning change:

1. Involve People in Planning for Changes That Affect Them. If you start by engaging those most likely to be impacted, you’re more likely to be addressing things they care about, and when change is made, they’ll see how it relates to their concerns.  You can involve people at the start, or you can spend lots of time grappling with cynicism and resistance! Involving them up front gets better ideas, builds buy in, and eases the way during implementation.

2. Create a Shared Picture. Change efforts often stall or stumble when they move into action without helping people connect the dots between their concerns and the actions being taken. We each see things from our own viewpoints depending on our role, where we sit, the groups we belong to, and the day-to-day challenges we face.  Surfacing a wide range of perspectives in ways that allow people to see the interconnections, agreements and divergence gets us to a shared picture – not who’s right, but a nuanced version of what’s going on and where we fit.  This lays a firm foundation for change efforts that stick.  

3. Build Common Ground and Foster Collective Action . Based on your shared picture, identify priorities that address critical concerns so you can move out together – at the top with enterprise policy and action and at various levels to the front line, factory floor or research bench. Understanding the big picture, including the nuances of different perspectives, allows everyone to do their part in moving big systems, acting locally in ways that make sense while simultaneously holding a more global mindset.

Bob Devlin teaches in Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership (ITL). In ITL’s Organization Development Consulting and Change Leadership (ODCCL) program, we explore how to support change efforts, as organizational leaders and as an external consultants. If you would like to be part of a community of professionals committed to helping organizations and people thrive, consider joining our next cohort.  Applications are due FEBRUARY 15^th.

This post was shared by Brian Emerson, PhD- faculty of the Executive Certificate in Organization Development Consulting & Change Leadership in the Institute for Transformational Leadership.  

Change leaders and consultants are often approached to help organizations shift “from” one state “to” another. Framing change initiatives in this way can be a setup for failure.

• We want to go from centralized to decentralized.
• We need to move from being so structured to being more creative and innovative.
• We want our teams to shift from a local perspective to thinking globally.

Approaching these situations with an either/or mindset leads to the dreaded “pendulum swing” which wastes resources, dampens morale, and forecasts doom for a change effort. For this reason, one of the most valuable skills change leaders and consultants can bring to organizations in the 21^st Century is the ability to help systems make sense of their reality with a both/and perspective.

What is a Polarity?  (Video length: 4:47)

One way to do this is to use polarities as a frame when leading change efforts. Polarities help  practitioners and leaders design change initiatives that bring about a new state without losing the benefits of the current state — and that can be the difference between success and failure.

Learning to use polarities helps consultants and internal leaders look at problems differently, ask different questions, hold different conversations, and, ultimately, help organizations create more sustainable realities:

• How do we get the benefits of being decentralized without losing the efficiency and clarity associated with being centralized?
• How can we be more creative and innovative without losing the good things about our structured culture?
• How can our teams adopt a global mindset without losing the benefits of thinking locally?

The Georgetown Organization Development Consulting & Change Leadership (ODCCL) program is one of, if not the only, change leadership program in the country that incorporates navigating polarities as a key thread and learning objective. The concept is woven throughout the program to ground participants in how polarities show up in all levels of systems (starting with the self) and at each phase of the change process. This focus helps students become change agents who ask the questions that lead to sustainable, meaningful, and successful change. If you would like to learn more, join us. Application deadline February 15^th.