John Gagné is a Toronto-based gallery director, curator, and art dealer with a decade of experience in the contemporary art world. He began his curatorial practice in New York City in 2016, working with artists and collectors and curating exhibitions across Brooklyn and Manhattan, before returning to Toronto in 2020 to establish Gagné Contemporary. Since then, he has grown the business into a two-gallery presence in Toronto, including a location at 401 Richmond Street West, representing and exhibiting both Canadian and international artists.

(Please excuse the poor video quality on my end… like with most of life’s “first times” there is always much more to learn.)

I had two fabulous weeks of staycation between ending work and starting school and I squeezed all the goodness out of those weeks that I possibly could. Tons of dancing, two beach days, lots of lunches and dinners with friends, organizing my apartment and finances, a blues festival, concerts, my dad’s 80th birthday party, errands, doctor’s appointments, and more. I was a whirling dervish of activity, and it felt great.

And then school started… last week. I thought I was prepared. I had bought the textbooks they listed, and a snazzy new pencil case, and resisted the urge to get a trapper-keeper, for old times’ sake. I downloaded syllabi and attended orientations. I was ready! And then I started to freak out.

In each class they added more books and articles, and with each one my anxiety kept ramping up. I am dyslexic (self-diagnosed in high school) and a very slow, insecure reader. I did not mention my dyslexia for decades because I was afraid it would stigmatize me. I was afraid people would think I was stupid. Attending a panel discussion on disability about six years ago changed all of that. I realized that I was senior and respected enough at work to “come out” and talk about my learning disability without any backlash, and that it may help others if I normalize it. So I did.

But now, in classes where I am by far the oldest student, in a field that is completely new (with new acronyms and vocabulary), I am struggling. My comfy life in marketing had little long-form content. Sure I read business-related books but at my own pace, and I consume a lot of audio books. But now…. NOW I am faced with this….

Plus the two textbooks still on order and piles of articles being added weekly. All in the next 4 months!!!

Every time I even think about tackling that pile, my heartbeat quickens, my stomach tenses and I my legs walk me to the chocolate stash in my kitchen.

This is why I have been posting about change and transformation. I am trying to remind myself (and all of you) that the mental and physiological reactions are normal, to be expected, and can be quelled. I know myself to be a capable person who is good at figuring out systems and efficient hacks to get hard things done. But I need to tame those bursts of anxiety in order to access that rational thought.

I also need to resist the urge to procrastinate by filling my day with easier things. Although, upside, I finally learned how to edit videos, so I have new things to share.

There are 5 new videos on the site. Each 2-3 min video dives into a researched psychological theory about change and how we react. They helped me, (especially self-efficacy on the reading situation), and I hope they will help you too. I did not email each individually as not to spam you, so visit the site (use the Substack app for the best experience) or access via these direct links.

Change Survival Thrive Kit

Coming soon: Conversations with badass members of the Collective-Thrive community about their adventures with change and transformation.

Understanding more about the psychology behind change has helped me lead teams through times of great change but has also helped me personally. Especially now in the midst of this transformation from corporate exec to student, I am trying to outsmart my brain’s natural proclivities to respond dramatically to change.

In this post I will share a helpful framework and some of my favorite change psychology.

Disclaimer: Having worked in marketing services, I am as far from an academic researcher as you can get. I am impatient, favor a PowerPoint slide over a paper, and love a quick summary with real-world examples. If you prefer properly cited research papers or going deeper on any of these topics, please ask your favorite LLM. I am going to summarize and eventually will post little videos for each. Choose your own adventure.

Bridges Transition Model

William Bridges was an organizational consulting practitioner with decades of experience who published his model in “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes” in 1980. It is widely used in the change management field and the basic premises are:

“Change” and “Transition” are not the same thing

• Change is the external and situational - Like me leaving my job as a Chief Transformation Officer or that iPhone update.

• Transition is the internal and psychological - The process of letting go of the old and becoming proficient in the new.

Transition has three overlapping phases:

1. Ending - The loss of what was (i.e. identity, competence, the familiar) needs to be acknowledged in this phase. Once acknowledged it must be grieved before anything new has a chance of taking hold.

2. Neutral Zone - The messy middle. This uncomfortable limbo zone where the old way of doing something is gone but the new way is not yet clear, trusted or learned. This phase is when productivity dips, anxiety often rises, but this is also where genuine creativity and reinvention happen if it isn’t rushed.

3. New Beginning - The magical point where you have accepted the new process, acquired the needed competency or accepted a new reality and are functioning within it.

In my iPhone example the Ending is me grumpily noting, processing and accepting that I can no longer edit my photos the way I used to before the darn update. The Neutral zone is when I fumble around discovering the new way to achieve the same (or hopefully better) result and getting proficient. The New Beginning is when I am editing those photos like a pro again without having to think about it or get frustrated.

I like Bridges’ simple framework because it serves as a reminder that we need to first allow a proper ending before we speed toward the new. It’s also ok, in fact wonderful, to allow yourself some trial and error time in the Neutral Zone. Outsmarting my own impatience and anxiety by reframing this phase as “productive discovery” helps me remain more comfortable and patient.

Identity Threat

Let’s start with this as it’s normally the first to hit in the “Ending” phase. “Who am I if I am no longer____ (X title, the expert on Y, able to accomplish Z)__?”

Swann, Johnson and Bosson’s 2009 research on Identity Threat focuses on how people respond when their sense of self is validated or contradicted by social feedback and organizational contexts. People don’t just do X job, they see themselves as being that job. For example, at a dinner party when asked about myself I start with my job because that’s how (until recently) I spent the majority of my day. Because that role is such a part of my identity any change to it feels like a personal threat. When Apple updates my iPhone I know it’s not personal but I do catch myself sounding like my 80 year old father saying “Why do they keep doing this to me?”. We feel stupid not being able to do something that was simple yesterday. That feeling is very personal and a threat to how we see ourselves. If the change does not affirm our identity, resistance hardens.

Loss Aversion

This comes from Kahneman and Tversky’s 1979 work on Prospect Theory. They prove that people don’t evaluate outcomes objectively. They evaluate against a reference point, and weight losses more heavily than gains. So imagine that you are granted an extra vacation day. That’s great, you like vacation. But if instead your company takes away an existing vacation day people will mutiny. Either way its still one vacation day but losing something you already had feels far more dramatic (2x more intense). The Ending phase, the change itself, always comes with a loss. Even if it was your choice, or something positive like a job promotion you have been working toward. Change means letting go of something. The tip here is to simply remember that your brain will want to make this more dramatic, so don’t let it. Keep the loss in perspective. If you are leading a team through a change, be really clear about what they are loosing and gaining. You will not be able to fill the void because losses feel immediate and future gains feel too abstract. But clarity and clear communication will focus the drama and anxiety instead of letting it run amuck.

Threat Response

Blascovich & Tomaka’s Challenge/Threat Appraisal Model published in 1996 discovered that ambiguity about the future triggers anxiety and defensive behavior. The vast majority of people are super freaked out by change because our brains tell us that unknown, ambiguous things are scary and unsafe. So every change, even iPhone updates, create anxiety that is often disproportionate to the reality of the situation.

Here again, just knowing your brain’s programming can help you outsmart it. Remind yourself that you are fine, safe, have been through worse, and will be ok.

When leading a team through change, it’s the same advice as above, be specific about what is changing and what is coming next. Spell out as much of the future as you can, in as much detail as possible. You will be reducing the noise of the unknown and thus reducing threat perception.

Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger’s 1957, “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance”, proposed that people hold multiple cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, knowledge) about their own behavior and are motivated to keep them consistent with one another. So when they conflict the person feels really uncomfortable and wants to quickly resolve the dissonance. The key finding was that people typically resolve dissonance via whichever route requires the least self-threat, which is usually rationalizing away the new information, discrediting its source, or minimizing its importance, rather than updating their self-concept or admitting the old way was flawed. Their brains are clinging to the idea they are most comfortable with, like someone ignoring evidence that their spouse is cheating because it conflicts with their belief in their happy marriage.

If you feel yourself getting defensive when receiving information, its a great signal to pause and fight the natural tendency to rationalize the feedback away. Allow yourself to critically examine it with an open mind.

From a team perspective, how you communicate the change is really important. For example, if you are automating a process, the team who was doing it manually will immediately assume your new solution could not possibly work. The dissonance is created when they think their experience is no longer needed and they will resist. But if you build it with them, utilizing their experience and knowledge of all the edge cases and scenarios, the solution will fit within their cognitions and you will get less resistance.

Self-Efficacy

Albert Bandura’s research in the late 1970s proposed that a person’s belief in their own ability/capability to achieve a specific goal is one of the strongest predictors of whether they initiate a behavior, how much effort they invest, and how long they persist when it gets hard. All of this is unrelated to their actual skill level. He identified four sources that build or erode self-efficacy:

• Mastery Experiences - having actually succeeded at something similar before

• Vicarious Experience - watching someone similar to you succeed

• Verbal Persuasion - being cheered on by others

• The person’s physiological or emotional state - how calm or anxious you feel as you start

This is why it is really hard to motivate someone who is convinced they will fail. To help yourselves and your teams through change you can remind everyone of a similar situation when they succeeded. Draw parallels. With a technology rollout, we always shine a spotlight on early adopters to create the vicarious experience. Show it can be done and cheer them on to try. Mitigating the psychological/emotional state is what I find hardest because it’s been non-stop change for years in most organizations and folks are worn out. This is the least important of the four but still needed. On a personal level, knowing you are approaching change, do your best to energize and recharge yourself and use tools like meditation, breath work and exercise to temper anxiety. A two minute breathing exercise can reset your physiology. Let me know if some examples would be helpful.

Awareness of these ways in which we are wired, and how to work with or mitigate them, can help you both personally and professionally navigate change with less anxiety, more control and comfort, and a lot more productivity.

Don’t just survive change, thrive through it!

I’m new at this. Not just new to Substack, but to sharing my thoughts in a public forum with any regularity. The idea of being a “content producer,” is daunting. But here I am, trying this out, because it feels like the right next step in a pretty radical adventure I have been on for the last few years: a very intentional mission to bring thrive back into my life. I am proud to say I’ve succeeded. I end most days feeling like my cup is not just full, but overflowing. My closest friends and colleagues have had a front row seat, and access to the insights and tools I’ve discovered. They are the ones encouraging me to share this more broadly.

So I am inviting all like-minded thrive-seekers to join me for the continuation of this adventure… at a pivotal moment. Today is my last day as a Chief Transformation Officer at a Fortune 500 company. I am leaving a job I loved, in an industry that has been home for two decades, to go back to school and become a therapist.

That may seem bonkers, and I’ll admit it took a lot of coaching and therapy before I could take that leap (which we will talk about). But helping people navigate transformation and supporting their personal and professional development has been at the heart of every role I have ever had. I have successfully built high-performing teams, led global organizations, launched new companies, and driven transformative change. But what mattered most to me was always the impact and success of the people within. That’s why I also became a Columbia University certified Executive Coach, because I wanted to improve the coaching I had done for years. I have plenty of leadership, coaching and change management thoughts to share, and I see becoming a therapist as adding more tools to my weird and eclectic toolkit.

What I hope to do here is create a space where we can discuss all this crazy stuff. Yes, I will be here doing the heavy lifting, but you are part of this too!

Together we will focus on:

• Personal transformation. Not just mine (unfolding in real time), but the possibilities and encouragement for yours.

• How coach-like behaviors can improve your relationships with colleagues, family and friends.

• Translating the psychological and therapeutic principals I am learning in my masters program to help support you as a person, and as an employee.

• Lots of actionable tips and tools.

The free subscription is the best place to start as you will get new weekly content and can comment so I know what resonates. I also decided to launch a paid tier, yes right from the start. Why? Because I am always reminding my coaching clients that their time is valuable. Mine is too, and as a new full time student, a coach, and a board member, I need this to be legit to remain a priority. The paid tier will include monthly live discussions, a moderated chat and more of the personal stuff that feels safer sharing in a smaller group.

I live and breath optimization so you can expect this community to evolve in real time based on your feedback, and me figuring this out.

If any of this sounds compelling to you, please join me and the Collective Thrive community by subscribing.

Let the adventure continue!