How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 57

People are 'unfrozen' and moving towards a new way of being.
That said this stage is often the hardest as people are unsure or
even fearful. Imagine bungey jumping or parachuting. You may
have convinced yourself that there is a great benefit for you to
make the jump, but now you find yourself on the edge looking
down. Scary stuff! But when you do it you may learn a lot about
yourself.
This is not an easy time as people are learning about the changes
and need to be given time to understand and work with them.
Support is really important here and can be in the form of
training, coaching, and expecting mistakes as part of the process.
Using role models and allowing people to develop their own
solutions also help to make the changes. It's also really useful to
keep communicating a clear picture of the desired change and
the benefits to people so they don't lose sight of where they are
heading.
Stage 3: Freezing (or Refreezing)
Kurt Lewin refers to this stage as freezing although a lot of
people refer to it as 'refreezing'. As the name suggests this stage
is about establishing stability once the changes have been made.
The changes are accepted and become the new norm. People
form new relationships and become comfortable with their
routines. This can take time.
It's often at this point that people laugh and tell me that
practically there is never time for this 'freezing' stage. And it's
just this that's drawn criticism to the Kurt Lewin model.
In todays world of change the next new change could happen in
weeks or less. There is just no time to settle into comfortable
routines. This rigidity of freezing does not fit with modern
thinking about change being a continuous, sometimes chaotic
process in which great flexibility is demanded.

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