Change can be daunting, but there are ways to conquer your fear and frustration.
All the way back around 500 B.C., Greek philosopher Heraclitus established the notion that the only constant in this life is change.
So, why are so many of our modern workplaces so bad at it?
Change Enthusiasm® Global founder Cassandra Worthy spent 15 years in the corporate world frustrated by leaders who addressed change in the abstract but failed to support their employees through it. Since leaving that world behind in 2019, she’s focused on helping organizations thrive through these periods—particularly by harnessing emotions that can lead to personal and professional growth.
“My work is to debunk the myth that emotion should be left at the door of business,” she tells SUCCESS. “Regardless of if you talk about them, they’re still gonna be there. It’s just a matter of if they’re driving your attrition rates up or if they’re allowing you to move successfully through change.”
With Change Enthusiasm®, Worthy has created a program that helps organizations embrace so-called “negative” emotions around change—whether that’s a buyout, restructuring or new management—by using those emotions to fuel positive growth. She wants you to know that your emotions are, well, worthy of interrogating in a workplace setting and that they can, in fact, be used to propel you to a new and better place during otherwise challenging times. We sat down with her to talk about harnessing your feelings to fuel positive growth, especially in the face of fast-paced change and disruption.
SUCCESS: Would you tell me about the origins of Change Enthusiasm®?
Cassandra Worthy: I went through a lot of change in my corporate career, and most of it was acquisition. I’ve been on both sides of the coin: I’ve been in a large organization that acquired a business for multibillion dollars… and then I’ve been a part of a business that got acquired by another large company…. And every time, I’ve felt the pain, the frustration, the anger, the anxiety, the fear—not knowing if I would wake up and have a job the next day.
I noticed that leaders would talk about, “This is gonna be tough times; it’s gonna be difficult; we’re going through a lot of change.” They would do that at the beginning, but then nothing else would be said about the difficulty, about the challenge. It was almost like this unspoken, grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it thing. In corporate, there’s the sentiment of, “Leave your emotions at the door. We understand you’re human—you have emotions. But don’t talk about them here.”
S: Right, right. “This is not the place.”
CW: Exactly. “This is not the place. I don’t need to hear that.” This never sat well with me, and I knew there was a better way. So, I actually started practicing this mindset that I coined, Change Enthusiasm®, back when I was in corporate going through these acquisitions and recognizing that the feelings I was having—the fear, the frustration—they always were signaling me to some moment of opportunity. Some way to learn about myself, to learn about something that I didn’t like, to learn about one of my boundaries. To learn about my colleagues, about the business. And it was up to me to choose. How was I gonna show up? How was I gonna use that emotional energy to work for me as opposed to against me?
Read the rest of the article from Success Magazine by Em Cassel: Change Enthusiasm’s Cassandra Worthy on Harnessing Your Emotions and Thriving Through Change
With contagious energy that radiates throughout every room she steps into, Cassandra Worthy is the world’s truly DISRUPTIVE thought-leader on CHANGE. She has created and cultivated the unique strategy of Change Enthusiasm® which is arming individuals around the world with the means to harness the power of emotion, a resource in infinite supply, to embrace and accelerate change and transformation journeys. Cassandra’s customized keynote and workshop programs motivate the workforce to embrace Change Enthusiasm® and subsequently become self-actualized in working towards a change vision. In her leadership-centric presentations, she is not only sharing this unique strategy of Change Enthusiasm® but also 10+ years of M&A experience distilled down into the critical leadership traits required to lead with exception during high-stress times of change and transformation.
