Coping with Change: Tools to Navigate Uncertainty with Confidence
Friends of Equate: Coping with Change
Change can be deeply unsettling—whether it’s a shift in role, a restructure, a new direction, or something unexpected. At our recent event, Coping with Change: Tools to Navigate Uncertainty with Confidence, Career & Leadership Coach Laura Ogilvie-Jones guided participants through practical strategies to manage transitions with clarity, resilience, and self-compassion.
Laura supports professionals to create careers and lives they truly love. With a warm, down-to-earth approach, she helps individuals navigate change, build confidence, and take purposeful next steps — especially during periods of uncertainty or growth. This tone set the foundation for a reflective, honest, and empowering session.
Understanding the Difference: Mentoring, Coaching, and Counselling
Laura opened by clarifying three forms of support that are often confused.
- Mentoring draws on the mentor’s experience.
- Counselling helps individuals process emotional or psychological challenges.
- Coaching, as Laura described, acts like a mirror — helping people access self-awareness, shape their next steps, and grow into the professional or leader they want to become.
This framing helped participants understand how coaching is uniquely positioned to support people navigating change.
Why Change Feels Hard — And Why That’s Human
Friends of Equate: Coping with Change
Throughout the session, Laura encouraged participants to acknowledge the full spectrum of emotions that accompany change. Using the Change Cycle, she illustrated how confusion, fear, sadness, frustration, imposter syndrome, or even anger are natural responses — not signs of a lack of capability.
Participants shared personal examples of:
- feeling grief during career shifts
- anger or blame when change felt imposed
- uncertainty during decision-making
- pressure to “be good” or get everything right
These reflections grounded the conversation in lived reality and reminded attendees that emotional responses deserve space and compassion.
Redefining Resilience — Without Toxic Positivity
A key theme was resilience: not the corporate version that demands constant toughness, but the grounded, human resilience that honours boundaries and self-care.
Laura also explored how resilience can be weaponised in toxic environments, where individuals are told to “cope better” instead of organisations addressing harmful conditions. This sparked an important conversation about reclaiming resilience as a personal resource — not a burden.
Friends of Equate: Coping with Change
Participants considered what resilience really looks like for them:
- setting and protecting boundaries
- recognising stress signals early
- seeking support
- revisiting past successes for confidence
- taking rest seriously
- holding values at the centre of decision-making
One participant shared how redefining their boundaries kept them from burnout, highlighting how resilience is intimately connected to wellbeing.
Values, Control, and What Truly Matters During Change
Laura introduced the circle of control, influence, and concern, inviting participants to examine where they direct their energy during challenging times. By focusing on what is within their control — behaviour, mindset, choices, boundaries — individuals can reduce overwhelm and build stability.
Participants reflected on:
- how their core values show up during stress
- what behaviours align or conflict with those values
- where they can influence change, and where they cannot
This helped create a sense of agency, even when external circumstances felt uncertain.
Moving from Reaction to Intention
Friends of Equate: Coping with Change
The event concluded with strategies for adopting a proactive rather than reactive mindset. Laura encouraged attendees to work with the natural process of change rather than resist it — to acknowledge difficult feelings, pause with intention, and then take purposeful next steps rooted in self-knowledge.
She recommended Brené Brown’s “Strong Ground” for leaders navigating uncertainty, vulnerability, and courage. Laura also offered one-to-one coaching for anyone wanting deeper support as they move through their own transitions.
The session left participants feeling seen, supported, and equipped with tools to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence — exactly the grounding many needed during this period of change.
