The Larsen Group

Circles of Change:  Conversations with Dr. Zara Larsen

 on Change Leadership and Career Fulfillment

March 16, 2008

“Trade Up: Changing Ourselves before Changing Others”

Guest:  Rayona Sharpnack, President of IWL

Anchoring Points:

1. Change comes about as a result of pain or possibility for a better future.
2. Redesigning of oneself does not come from grand visions, although grand visions may result.  It’s about the frame of mind we hold onto when we walk into a room.
3. We assess right and wrong against the backdrop of experience or knowledge – the context that prevails in our culture and upbringing.  Thus, our challenge can be to violate the sacred rules of our logical minds.
4. Trading Up requires going through a complicated, sometimes stressful and emotionally provocative process of unearthing our fundamental beliefs about reality – getting in touch with our authentic self – to then shape a new context that expresses who we are while better serving the changes we seek in the world.

• Revealing existing contexts and putting each one in the form of a conclusion.
• Take ownership for each context and assess its impediments and its virtues.
• Design new contexts that will serve our best interests.
• Practice to sustain new contexts; what to start/stop doing, build reliability.  Practice makes permanent (not necessarily perfect).
• Engage, identify and enlist others to keep us honest about operating from the next contexts, or backsliding from the old.

5. Consider the kaleidoscope, where only a slight turn of the lens presents an entirely different image.  Context shifting is about how the slightest adjustment in language can bring forth an entirely new way of being.
6. We all have the opportunity to be more discerning with our intentions, regardless of where we are or where we want to go in life.  As Lily Tomlin once said, “I always wanted to be someone … I just wish I had been more specific.”  Consider Trading Up! 

Additional Thoughts from Dr. Zara Larsen: 

1. “The spotlight is something that shines from within at least as much as the glare from without.”  Heroine Megan Fitzpatrick from Anna Quindlein’s novel, Rise and Shine.
2. “If you want to travel fast, travel alone; if you want to travel far, travel together”.  Unknown. 
3. Sometimes you need to go slow, to go fast.