Letter to the person in the change
Letter to person in the change.
Hi,
This letter is to you - the person living inside the change plan, or perhaps the consequences of it.
Perhaps you're in the middle of a restructure, a merger, perhaps parts of what you have been doing for a long time - very well, too - are being outsourced to another team or a system.
Maybe you're in a role that no longer fits, or fear it will be surplus to requirements soon.
Perhaps the organisation looks nothing like the one you joined and is in its third transformation programme in as many years, whilst you are still catching your breath from the last one.
If that's you, this is what I want you to know.
What you are feeling is not a performance problem.
The 3pm confusion fog is real.
The weariness from doing far too much whilst not knowing quite enough is real.
The Sunday night dread is real.
The days when you're fine and the days when you're not, both are real. And none of this means you're failing.
I know this because I've been there.
As the person who lived it, and as someone who has worked with many people going through it.
I built my career in management consulting. A transient environment - frequent movement, new clients, new teams, constant assessment. You learn to work without much that feels fixed.
And then, at one point, that shifted as well. First a merger, and later an acquisition by a much larger organisation.
From the outside, very little changed. The work still had to land. Clients still expected the same level of delivery.
Inside, it was different.
Questions that normally sit in the background moved to the foreground:
Who is my boss, actually?
What do they value?
How am I being judged now?
What is expected of me - really?
What is my future in the new place?
Do I have a future here?
There weren't always clear answers, or the answers changed. And still, the expectation was to continue, to deliver, to maintain the same level and do more.
I have worked with many client teams going through exactly the same.
The customer service representative on the phone to an angry customer, trying to deliver excellent service, whilst in front of them is a new system they haven't yet mastered.
The finance leader standing in front of their team presenting the new vision, unsure themselves, conscious they don't have all the answers.
The team whose work is being outsourced to a third party, asked simultaneously to train new people, provide excellent service, orient themselves in a new role, and manage an emotional and physical workload that no one has officially acknowledged.
Change doesn't just asks you more than to learn a new system or report to a different manager.
It asks you to revise your understanding of where you belong, what you're good at, and who you are in this place.
That takes way more than the six-week implementation plan allows for.
The resistance isn't stubbornness.
It's often loyalty to something that mattered.
Resistance is often loyalty to a way of working, a team, a system, a version of your role that genuinely mattered.
That deserves to be acknowledged. Not managed away.
And the fatigue - the specific exhaustion of being expected to perform normally while internally recalibrating, often expected to do more - is one of the least spoken costs of change.
“Every transition begins with an ending”
William Bridges, who spent decades studying how people move through transitions, said transitions begin with an ending. With grief.
You may feel like switching off, or crying, or anger and all of that is normal. That grief is real.
And it is also, when you're ready, a doorway.
If you recognise yourself in this, start here.
What are you being asked to let go of - and what hasn't been replaced yet?
A lot of the confusion in change comes from trying to keep operating as if the old still fully exists.
Naming what's actually gone, even privately, even imperfectly, doesn't resolve it overnight. But it makes the experience clearer, and a bit more yours to navigate.
From there, something else becomes possible.
Give yourself a little space. Physically, and mentally.
When we feel under pressure or uncertainty, we tend to speed up, we become more reactive, more externally focused, trying to keep pace with what's expected.
But your internal map is being redrawn at the same time and that takes attention. Not all of it needs to go into output. Some of it needs to go into re-mapping.
That's part of the work.
Small anchors help.
A short walk.
A familiar place.
Something that brings a moment of steadiness into a day that feels less certain.
And if you can, stay a little curious - not forced, just enough to notice what might be shifting, not only what is being lost.
You are living inside something that looks structured from the outside and feels very different from within.
The plan has a timeline. Your experience doesn't follow it.
That gap - between what the project board sees and what you're carrying - is real, and it matters, and it is not yours to resolve alone.
You are not behind. You are not difficult.
You are simply doing the heavy lifting of being human in a system that forgot, cannot, or doesn't yet know how to account for it.
Be patient with the map-making; the way through doesn't belong to the plan, it belongs to you.
Warmly,
Maria
