What my daughter's first week at school taught me about coping with change
Navigating change, the highs and the lows…
I always find this back-to-school season brings a sense of change, transition and pace as we head into the final stretch of the year. This year the busyness feels even more so.
For the leaders I work with, change and transition seem to be coming thicker and faster than ever, and that's understandably leading to a regular sense of overwhelm. If you're feeling that too, you're in good company.
Earlier this year, we spoke to 25 senior executives about their biggest leadership challenges. Burnout came first. Managing change came a close second. What's useful to know is that the two are deeply connected, and the same strategies genuinely help with both.
My daughter started primary school this week. We assumed the lead-up would be all excitement, and mostly it was, but the first real test came when she found out her best friend wasn't in her class. Cue tears.
What struck me was what she did next. She didn't bottle it up, and she didn't spiral either. Over the following days, she:
Stayed curious about her new environment, working out where things were and how the day worked
Let the difficult feelings be there, crying when she needed to rather than pushing it down (and she cried a lot!)
Looked for moments of connection and lightness, finding common ground and laughing with new friends and teachers
Leaned into the unknown, choosing curiosity and exploration over dread as the new days came
It's a lesson for us all: change always brings highs and lows. The more we accept that, the sooner we can embrace it and settle into the "new" normality.
There's good psychological grounding for why this works. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory shows that even brief moments of positive emotion, alongside difficult ones, widen our thinking and build the resilience we draw on next time things get hard.
Fi wasn't avoiding the hard feelings, she was making room for both.
Most of us, as leaders, treat change as something to push through alone. It rarely feels like that to the people around us, who are usually navigating their own version of the same thing. Change is constant, and it's also how we get to whatever comes next. Holding that a little more lightly, rather than gripping it as a problem to solve and be done with, tends to reduce the toll it takes.
Two short, evidence-based practices to try in September, for you and your team…
1. Say it, settle it
When a change stirs up frustration, anxiety or overwhelm, simply naming the emotion out loud or on paper ("I'm feeling anxious about this restructure") measurably reduces its intensity. This comes from Dan Siegel's affect labelling research: putting words to a feeling engages the prefrontal cortex and calms the amygdala's stress response.
2. Track the wave, not the weather
Change rarely moves in a straight line. At the end of each day this week, jot down one high point and one low point. Over time, this builds what positive psychologists call meta-awareness, the recognition that ups and downs are part of the normal cycle of change, not a sign you're failing to cope.
Why coaching cultures help through change
What Fi did instinctively, staying curious, naming what she felt, and looking for connection, is close to what we try to build deliberately in organisations through coaching. Teams with a genuine coaching culture, where leaders ask more and tell less, tend to adapt to change faster. People feel able to voice concerns early rather than let them surface later as resistance or disengagement, and that early visibility is often what makes change programmes succeed or stall.
This is exactly what we're building into the Leader as Coach programme we're developing with one of our clients at the moment. The idea is simple: give leaders the coaching skills to help their own teams navigate change well, rather than relying on us, or any external partner, to do it for them. More on that in our next newsletter…
If this blog resonated, or you're navigating a period of change yourself, I'd love to talk through what's showing up for you or your leadership team right now.