4 Resilience and change

One way of thinking about career and personal resilience is that developing resilience leads to success in dealing with change.

Psychologist John Fisher has developed a model of personal change – the Personal Transition Curve (see Figure 2) – through work that examines how individuals respond to changes being made within their organisations. Fisher’s work is based on, and advances, earlier work in psychology dating back to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work on death, loss and grief in 1973.

Fisher identifies eight stages of personal transition in response to change in the workplace, ranging from ‘anxiety’ to ultimately ‘moving forward’ – although not all stages are of equal length or significance for each person, even within the same changing organisation.

Figure 7 Fisher’s Personal Transition Curve – larger version available [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]

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Fisher’s transition curve (Fisher, 2012) identifies eight stages in the following order:

• anxiety (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘Can I cope?’
• happiness (here there is a speech bubble saying ‘At last something’s going to change’)
• fear (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘What impact will this have? How will it affect me?’)
• threat (here there is a speech bubble saying ‘This is bigger than I thought!’)
• guilt (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘Did I really do that?’)
• depression (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘Who am I?’)
• gradual acceptance (here there is a speech bubble saying ‘I can see myself in the future’)
• moving forward (here there is a speech bubble saying ‘This can work and be good’).

There are also sub-stages that branch off from the main curve:

• denial – this sub-stage branches away from happiness (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘Change? What change?’)
• anger – this sub-stage branches away from happiness
• disillusionment – this sub-stage branches away from threat (here there is a speech bubble saying ‘I’m off! … this isn’t for me!’)
• hostility – this sub-stage branches away from depression (here there is a speech bubble asking ‘I’ll make this work if it kills me!!’)
• Complacency – this sub-stage is greyed out. It begins at anxiety and continues all the way to moving forward.

Figure 7 Fisher’s Personal Transition Curve – larger version available

He also identifies three further ‘points’ where people may get stuck, rather than moving through the transition process. These are ‘denial’ of or ‘hostility’ towards change, and ‘disillusionment’ – where someone may decide that they will leave the organisation. ‘Complacency’ is another element that can run throughout the process.

The transition phases represent a sequence in your levels of self-esteem as you experience change. These changes in self-esteem appear to follow a predictable path, so identifying the eight phases can help you to understand the transition process better.

Although this model describes transition as a sequence, not everyone in job transition will experience every phase. Each person’s progress is unique: one may never get beyond denial or disillusionment; another may drop out during the depression phase; others will move smoothly and rapidly to the later phases.

You’ll explore self-esteem and its contribution to career resilience in more detail in Weeks 5 and 6.

In the next activity, you’ll consider an occasion where you faced change, and try to plot your own transition curve.