Change Takes Courage

From Routine to Revolution: Embracing the Courage to Change

Imagine for a moment that you’ve just woken up. The minute you stop your morning alarm, you shift into your morning routine.

You start the coffee machine while brushing your teeth and checking for any urgent emails. You run through a mental plan for the day while getting yourself ready. If you have kids, you might throw together breakfasts and lunches while they get ready for school. It took some time to get your routine down, but now you move through it with practiced ease.

At work, it’s much the same. No matter how complicated the job, we create processes, develop muscle memory, and create a comfortable routine that leads us to success. We teach our teams to adopt our efficiencies. Over the years, we keep fine-tuning, becoming more than habit—“the way we do things” evolves into a culture. And we reward conformity to it.

It's not all bad: We’re wired to look for patterns, and it feels comfortable to perpetuate them. But most leaders don’t want to admit when they’re holding up the status quo.

Our unconscious instinct to stick with what we know means that our companies are built around efficiencies that, at a certain point, can work against us. When we operate on autopilot, we stop paying attention to our assumptions. We may be holding up norms that no longer serve us, or prioritizing familiarity over growth.

But true innovation demands more than good ideas—it takes guts.

I often felt this tension as a woman in leadership. As I rose through the ranks, I felt the narrow definition of what a leader looks like. The temptation was to conform to those examples—either putting on a suit and jumping in with the sharks or being the emotional, empathetic counterpoint.

Neither option felt authentic. Looking at the women leaders around me, I saw that we all were responsible for creating new examples. We could challenge the stereotypes just by being ourselves.

It takes courage to move away from the safety of experience and toward the unknown of our potential. We can’t do it on autopilot. And we start by disrupting our own patterns. How can we motivate our teams to innovate and adapt when we harbor our own resistance to change?

Breaking out of the status quo doesn’t require us to declare war on the old ways. Instead, we need to remove the filter of our expertise and see things as they are. Let go of the history and the assumptions to ask yourself, “Is this really the best we can do?”

The act of asking can feel radical in and of itself. Shaking things up doesn’t always make you the most popular person in the room. But part of your role as a leader is to do the right thing, not the popular thing. Come to terms with the fact that disrupting your teams’ predictability and efficiency may ignite some resilience. Acknowledge those feelings openly and reassure people that you’ll move through the uncertainty together.

Most importantly, we can create cultures that reward courage over conformity. When we encourage curiosity and experimentation, we must also make space for discomfort, inefficiency, and, yes, even failure. But our flaws and happy accidents can be the secret ingredient for our wildest successes. To embrace a new way of thinking, we shouldn’t just tolerate mistakes; we should learn to appreciate the value in them.

Remember, every great innovation in history started with someone courageous enough to believe in a better way. You can (and should!) be that voice in your company. It won’t always be easy. Then again, nothing worthwhile is. Your team and your own growth depend on you welcoming the challenge anyway.