The Healthy Change

The healthy change

Gaby Planchart

gaby.planchart01@gmail.com

            The positive messages and encouragement when you decide to do something new in your life are rewarding. The feedback received from my readers, friends, colleagues and family to the first article posted “Change: A constant in our lives”, gives me enthusiasm to keep writing about this topic. I would love to hear your comments and feedback on this and many other aspects related to our professional and personal lives. So I invite you to write me on my email gaby.planchart01@gmail.com.

            The need to achieve balance motivated this article, where I write about how to face the change in the physical aspect of my life. Health was one of my pending matters within this balance. My son and my mother were my logical motivations. The two decided to be healthy and fight against obesity. My son just took that decision when he was 10 years old. Tired of the typical teasing at his school, he took action on the issue. He began to eat less and exercise more. His will power, advice and feedback have been my inspiration, my support and my conscience, respectively. My mother, in her forties (his modern mathematics applies that the old 50s is the new 30s), began suffering from hyperthyroidism and diabetes type 2. Her love of life made ​​her focus on health. With the help of her endocrinologist and modern medicine, she established a healthy routine of diet and moderate activity; therefore, the results were very specific. Now she is fine and her energy is amazing in her mid-fifties (doing the calculations in modern mathematics is now eighty-odd years). Both got their own inspiration, realized the need for change, triggered to achieve and reached their desired new situation.

            We had talked in the previous article about the three stages of a change process. These stages are identifying the need for change, the change in motion and the new level in the planned change (Lewin / Schein). My process of identifying the need for change was long and quite illogical. For me obesity has been a tool to manage anxiety as a result of a highly challenging working environments and living in an increasingly unsafe and politically complicated Venezuela. Failure to properly manage anxiety has been affecting my health over time. I always boasted of being a happy and healthy fat girl. My emotional management was flawed because I was always using excuses. After I was 40 years old, obesity began to take its toll. My body began to show the typical signs of metabolic syndrome: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, dyspnea, rosacea, neck mini-warts, hyperinsulinism, joints pain, and finally endometriosis at an old age (according to my mom’s modern mathematics I am twenty-nine years old). This latter disease can be eliminated by means of hysterectomy or in other words removing the uterus and ovaries. This event was my great shock as I had to really internalize the need for change and was the plaintiff to manage change. Surgery is not my first option. This is the reason I had never opted for extreme weight-loss options such as bariatric surgery. Now, I was faced to opt for surgery to resolve endometriosis. Again it was not an option, it is a very invasive solution and carrying many risks because of my weight.

            Always the world of action handles different solutions. In my case, one of them was in my hands. If I decided to lose weight to hormonal imbalances that cause the disease, the endometriosis could be controlled. This is where I started a new healthy life since September 2012.

Change for positive influence

            Positive influence is one of the most rewarding actions that anyone can have in life.  El Horizonte New has created a perfect platform to positively influence our readers, friends, advertisers and our entire Latino community.

            Through this column I will be making logical connections and sometimes not so logical ones to topics learned and unlearned in my personal and professional life. Women and men who have managed to build a modern family shared with going up the ladder in their professional careers have always had simple and complex challenges. Therefore, it requires managing the five pillars of the human being.

            Recently watching the movie "Chasing Mavericks" with my son, I realized it uses the five pillars to teach a challenging sport like surfing the biggest waves in the world. It's a film that I recommend to see with the kids because it gives the opportunity to talk with them, stressing these pillars contrasted to other anti-values ​​depicted in this movie.

            The five pillars are linked to the cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and cultural intelligence. Many experts have written about it and some with their variants. For the late Steven Covey (2004), in his book The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, a person with leadership means taking into balance and harmony the four intelligences: the physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual. Clint Sidle (2007), the leadership program director of The Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, refers to five intelligences and develops his essay from the wisdom of ancient cultures such as Native American, African, Celtic, and Tibetan, among others. He recognizes them as the five leadership intelligences ranging from intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence, intuitive intelligence, action intelligence, and finally, all are connected with spiritual intelligence. In more down to earth concepts, it is to consider how we are experts with our knowledge, our emotions, our health, our friends, acquaintances or our networking, and finally all linked with our spirit. The important thing is that these pillars are connected together like a wagon wheel and in the center of the wheel is the spiritual connection. As leaders in our families and our workplace, we can be vehicles of transformation as well as positive agents of change. It is all about a moral leadership that it is much needed focusing in doing good from every point of view.

            In order to handle in equilibrium these five pillars, one of the best lessons I have had in my life is to accept change. Transformation is a force that can impact positively or negatively depending on how one manages the force. Those who accept the change or promote change give the sign needed to positively achieve things happening. While those who reject develop a negative change in the actions that often counteracts or find it difficult to achieve their personal and professional goals.

            Managing change is critical in all aspects of our lives. Professionally there are corporations that incorporate change management as one of its core corporate values. In successful companies like Target, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, among others, the change is a fundamental foundation of its corporate culture and new products and services are often a result of projects that promote change.          

            On a personal level, we have always been involved in major changes during the course of our lives. Sometimes we are leading actors and other times you are part of the cast. Latinos living in the United States have experienced the change as a result of our decision to migrate from our countries of origin. In my case, my family already has moved four times. The first two included the whole family and the last two involved only my daughter to pursue her graduate studies and thereafter to her permanent residence as she found a new job. As a family and as a team, we manage change in a positive way, always being flexible, joking about the struggles and adapting to our new lives.

            An easy way to see the positive change is through understanding the process and its phases. There are three stages: the need for change, the change in action and the desired situation (Lewin / Schein). A good leader uses multiple tools to make change happen. Among these tools are the following: analysis of the situation; anxiety management; vision and common values; communicate, communicate and educate in order to achieve the vision together; be a role model for change; openly discuss anxieties and resistance to change; and establish stabilizing systems and structures with the new phase once the change has been achieved.

            In my experience as a manager, project leader, wife and mother, the best action is to define the vision along with your team – at the workplace or in your family. This action together with a trustful communication, which requires listening to all the persons involved and acting with great humility is the key to success. You will be amazed if you are opened to listen anyone’s ideas.  As a matter of fact, the best ideas come from your own environment - your peers, your boss, your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your kids or your friends. Listen to your people.