How to Help Others Through a Difficult Transition

"I don't want to go to ski class!" Sophia, my four-year-old daughter, was crying. I knelt down on the snow so we could be at eye level and asked her why.

"I just don't want to go," she whimpered.

I didn't want her to skip class. She was already skiing well — turning and stopping on her own — so I knew she could do it. Plus she'd asked for lessons and we'd committed with the instructor. I wanted to teach her that she needed to follow through on her commitments. Finally, I had seen this before: she'd cried while learning to ride a bicycle, but when she finally learned, she was tremendously proud of herself.

I tried to comfort her, reason with her, convince her that, in fact, she liked class and at the end of it she would smile and tell me she had fun.

But she was still crying when we walked up to her ski teacher. She hugged me, then hugged me again. I walked away but when I heard her continue to cry, I came back and hugged her more, telling her again how the class would help her ski better, how she would have fun, how it wouldn't be so bad.

Finally, after twenty minutes of trying to comfort her without success, I tore myself away.

Later that morning I was on the chair lift with two teenagers and their mother. I asked the mother what she would do in my situation.

She didn't hesitate. "Drop 'em and run!" She laughed. "Remember?" She looked at one of her sons. "I would put you on the floor at daycare and 10 seconds later you could hear the tires screeching as I pulled away."

Now we were all laughing and I realized she was right. My mistake? I prolonged the agony.

A few weeks ago I extolled the virtues of transition time, arguing that if we only built in a little extra time before a meeting, call, or event, we could use that time to prepare.

It's incredibly valuable when the transition time is used to make the subsequent activity more useful, more productive, maybe even shorter.

But there in some situations transition time isn't the solution. It's the problem. As long as Sophia was in the transition, she was miserable. And by trying to comfort her through it, I prolonged her misery. I kept her in the pain of the transition.

We do this in organizations all the time. We decide on a change and then spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to get everyone to feel great about it before they have a chance to experience it. We try to get them to want it.

But sometimes, too much preparation can be a bad thing.

Imagine you're on a cliff overhanging a river and you've decided you're going to jump into the water. Would you be better off standing at the edge, looking down, convincing yourself it will be OK? Or would you be better off just jumping without thinking about it? Read More Here

from Harvard Business