A PM 2025 Meditation

Finding confidence takes practice!

Stress.  It’s a fact of life for change leaders.  We lead from the front, presenting the face of change, optimistic and realistic at the same time.  It’s hard sometimes, especially when the change inspires strong responses.  Frustrated leaders who want benefits NOW, team members who are not convinced the change is necessary anyway and are doing two jobs, their regular work and participating in this new thing, other efforts impacting your momentum and resources, it’s a lot!

We know our job is to be calm, composed, competent, and confident.  How to get there?  Try this PM meditation:

• I am calm so I can be a faithfully objective observer.

• I am composed to manage my impact on team tone.

• I am competent to adapt my skills and techniques to this situation.

• I am confident in my role supporting the success of others.

The 4 Cs of presence help to remind us to wear the right hats, stay in the right lanes, and to respect ourselves and our skills.  Change leaders are serving a larger vision of the targeted state, as well as the road to get there.  Our unmanaged responses can break the team’s focus because of our role as a face of change. Nervousness, disappointment, frustration, anxiety, fear, they’re all valid to feel, but not to express in the moment.  Instead, we need to take a deep breath and process our own feelings before we engage with the team.

Let’s dig into what we mean with each statement.

I am calm so I can be a faithfully objective observer.  

When we are in the right role in our heads, facilitating a team to success, our job is to guide the team forward, responding to their current state of readiness and resilience to ensure a feasible and dignified approach. 

If we quiet our own anxiety and remind ourselves of our job, to guide and report faithfully, we can regulate our own emotions to be prepared to take in all available information from the moment.  It’s not about us, or even them, it’s about this moment in time on the road to positive change. 

I am composed to manage my impact on team tone.  

When we are calm, we can ready ourselves to be the face of change, using our composure to help instill the same in the team.  If it’s time to buckle down, we can present that focus to the team in our own actions. If it’s time to celebrate, we can express that joy appropriately. 

It’s our composure that enables us to represent positivity and use our presence as a tone-set for the team. Staying composed and self-regulating also instills credibility in achievable goals, right-sizing intensity and urgency.

I am competent to adapt my skills and techniques to this situation.

We have our disciplines of change we have invested in to reach our current level of expertise.  We can be proud of our experiences, but more importantly, we have taken on the requirement to adapt and apply the skills we gained to what this effort actually needs. 

We are not hammers looking for nails.  We are not advocates for a one-right-way to chart the course from here to there. We are guides and facilitators, using our techniques judiciously to support team success.  Deep breaths, active learning and listening, and intentional retrospectives continuously reinforce our competence to meet the team where they are.

I am confident in my role supporting the success of others.

The art of leading change does tend to swell heads. We take permission to become visionaries of perfection sometimes, and we may take this journey personally, which does not serve the team.  It takes deep confidence to drop your ego and be of service to the team on the journey THEY need to be on. 

Being able to pull from your toolkit of techniques, tools and experience to meet each moment so that the team feels the support but isn’t distracted from their purpose shows mastery of the role, so that you can state this last affirmation and mean it.

The four statements that make up the 4 Cs of presence as a change leader are mantras, reminders that we are not there for our own aggrandizement.  Change leadership is a profession of service and collaboration.  With our own self-regulation, we can be clear-headed and focused on the team, giving them our best while inspiring them to theirs.

How to use the 4 Cs mantras:

• Take them in. Go back and read them again.  Try saying them out loud to yourself.  How does that feel?  No imposter syndrome here, just a dose of self-respect.

• Use them in the moment. Before high impact meetings, or just when you need to re-center yourself, recite the 4 Cs of presence mantras, then do a little head rotation or back stretch to relax your body (wow, let that tension go for a minute!) and acknowledge what you have said.  

• Use them to plan your own development. Use the 4 Cs, calm, composed, competent and confident, to guide where you may need to do a little more work to make these statements fully truthful to yourself.

• Use them with peers. In your peer group of change leaders, talk about what the 4Cs of presence mean to you in your situations and learn from each other.  

• Use them to guide others. If you lead change leaders, introduce this meditation and use it to discuss expectations of presence for your organization. 

One of the most important requirements of change leaders is to self-regulate. Doing so can be difficult sometimes, so remember:

• You are calm so you can be a faithfully objective observer.

• You are composed to manage your impact on team tone.

• You are competent to adapt your skills and techniques to this situation.

• You are confident in your role supporting the success of others.

Jennifer Diamond is CEO of Maypop Grove, a coaching and consulting firm focused on the disciplines of leading change, and co-founder of A Matter of Taste, a professional development firm with a culinary twist.