Change: According To Our Internal Journalists

Asking two strangers to talk to each other about how change works is a tall order. Especially when the invitation from me is telling them I want to unpack the editing of change stories. What pushes us forward, what freezes us, and what rolls us back.

How we all edit the stories we tell. About ourselves and about the others. Why sometimes we can look backwards and move forwards, but other times we’re looking forward and moving backwards.

Change is just hard to talk about. I needed to hear from some people who almost exclusively talk about change in their work, but in different ways. So I called up a professional ghostwriter/career journalist and a Financial Therapist/Organizational Psychologist and Just Press(ed) Record.

Dr. Meghaan Lurtz is an expert in The Transtheoretical Model of Change. Aka “The transtheoretical model” if you’re a practitioner. Aka the TTM if you’re a cool kid.

It’s kind of like separating the narrative arcs from the process of making a movie and studying stills.

The TTM (I’m cool, I made a TLC joke in the episode about it, just roll with me here) is a framework for understanding change you might not hear of outside of a classroom. But you should. It’s crazy useful.

Ted Merz is a career journalist, ghostwriter, and online essayist. He’s seemingly thought and written about it all, and yet there’s always another story he can find to tell. He’s eternally in search of the evocative. What a story, or a snapshot, can bring out of a reader. Ted’s an expert in the feelings around change.

Meg and Ted hadn’t met before this call. The exploration of each other’s perspective on a topic as big as change did not disappoint.

We covered the role pain plays (and often doesn’t play) as a motivator for change.

We cover meaning-making versus meaning-mapping for professionals documenting and/or assisting changes.

We cover… flossing. I don’t know how we got there. But it makes sense, you just have to hear it.