🛣️ How to embrace change and grow from it with Katie Martin – Head of Marketing Excellence at innocent
Read time: 3 minutes
Table of Contents
- Katie’s three ingredients for embracing change
- 🌳 What is a growth mindset?
- 🧑🌾 How do we cultivate a growth mindset?
- Katie’s top book recommendations
For the final webinar of season 10, we were joined by the ever-lovely TMM community member, Katie Martin.
Fun fact #1 about Katie – her great, great, great grandfather invented the Terry’s Chocolate Orange!
Fun fact #2 – Katie has spent the last 12 years working at innocent – which means she really knows her onions (and bananas) when it comes to marketing, change and growth.
Which is exactly what this session was all about. Over the course of an hour, Katie covered:
🍌 the ingredients needed for embracing change
❓ the importance of curiosity
🌳 why cultivating a growth mindset matters
Katie’s answers to the community questions were just as thoughtful as her presentation, so do give the full thing a watch below, or read on for the key takeaways.
Katie’s three ingredients for embracing change
- Understand how you personally react to change
- Stay curious to different perspectives
- Create the right ecosystem, with a strong feedback culture
Understand how you personally react to change
Before we can embrace change, we really need to understand how we as individuals react to it – we’re all capable of going through change, but we probably have a preference of how we go through it, one way or the other. Some people love change, some people hate it.
Whatever change we’re going through, however big or small, whatever stage of the change journey we’re on, it’s important that we pause and consider what we think or how we feel about it. It may make you feel comfortable or really uncomfortable, but understanding how you react to it is one of the important tools to have in your toolkit.
Stay curious to different perspectives
The way we see the world is completely unique to us and that’s because of several different factors.
The first element is our past experience – we all draw from past experiences that are unique to us. The second element is the noise around us. The sensory data that we process every day.
When you bring those two things together, we all have a completely unique perception of the world and how it works.
When you apply change discussions in a work environment, we will all be reacting very differently because we all perceive the world in a totally unique way. And if our perception of the world is completely unique, our version of reality will also be completely unique.
Why is this relevant to us going through change?
- If we only share ideas with people who have similar experiences to us, we’re unlikely to learn about different perspectives. When we’re going through change, and life in general, having diversity of thought and a robust understanding of others’ experiences is essential.
- By acknowledging that our own reality cannot represent the whole truth, we’re admitting we need to stay curious and keep learning. Curiosity is one of the most important things to maintain when going through change.
- By broadening our understanding of reality, welcoming different experiences and reframing challenges as learning points, we develop our resilience. Resilience is key when it comes to change.
Create the right ecosystem, with a strong feedback culture
So, we need to create an environment where both setbacks and successes are treated as ways to learn. This comes down to building trust – with the people you work with, within teams, and within wider businesses. With trust, comes psychological safety:
🌳 What is a growth mindset?
We hear a lot about growth mindsets, but do you know where the term originated?
It’s all about having a growth mindset vs a fixed mindset. Generally speaking, people who have a growth mindset, embrace a challenge, they enjoy constantly seeing new opportunities, and are inspired by others.
As Katie explains, it’s not about how you fall over, it’s about how you get back up that really matters!
💭 Why does a growth mindset matter?
We are all works in progress. We have the ability to learn something new everyday. Having a growth mindset is about asking how we can reframe our failures into opportunities to learn.
At innocent, it’s woven into their marketing philosophy:
- We lead with our purpose (in a profitable way)
- We put people at the heart of what we do
- We encourage more people to buy us so we can do more good
- We make it an easy experience for people
- We have a growth mindset – keep learning and sharing so they’re always improving
Think about failure as a circle. Ask yourself, what has happened here and how can we improve what we’re doing with the learnings?
🧑🌾 How do we cultivate a growth mindset?
- You have a choice: mind over matter. In every situation you are in, you can choose how you act and react to that situation. Whatever the end might look like – however shrouded in uncertainty – you can believe that something good will come from the situation because at the very least, you will be learning something. We can reprogramme our minds to believe in ourselves.
- It’s hard to embrace a growth mindset all of the time – changes don’t happen overnight. Value growth over speed. And use the word ‘yet’.
- Live your best 75% life and really believe in yourself – how can you reframe what your ‘all’ means to you? Perfect humans don’t exist. When we get ‘room for improvement’ feedback it makes us human.
Katie’s top book recommendations
- The First 90 Days – Michael D. Watkins
- The Rules of Work – Richard Templar