#657 Leading Change with NLP: Engaging Hearts and Minds that Last

What if leading change wasn’t about process and spreadsheets — but about people?

In this inspiring conversation, Change Leadership and Confidence expert Lata Hamilton shares how Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques can help leaders engage hearts and minds during times of transformation.

Traditional change management often focuses only on logistics — timelines, deliverables, and frameworks. But lasting change happens when people believe in the future being created. Lata reveals how NLP and coaching can unlock genuine connection, help teams see the benefits of change, and empower them to take ownership of their new roles and futures.

You’ll discover why ignoring the emotional side of change can lead to mistrust, how to communicate in a way that inspires alignment, and why preparing teams for the future of work matters now more than ever.

If you lead people, clients, or projects — this episode will help you change the way you lead change.

🔗 CONNECT WITH LATA

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/latahamilton

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/latahamiltonchange

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latahamilton/

Website: https://www.latahamilton.com

📌 PROMOTION:

Download Lata’s free “Underpaid & Overlooked Coaching Action Guide”:
https://www.latahamilton.com/worthit

Get Lata's free "Creative Launch Ideas Guide": https://www.latahamilton.com/launch

Read Lata’s “Pioneer Your Career Change” book: https://www.latahamilton.com/pioneer

Transcript

Intro | 00:00
Business insights on talking with the experts. Hosted by Rose Davidson. 

 Rose | 00:10
Hello. Did you realise that organisational change management is traditionally focused on the technical side of change? But that's only half the story. We need to engage our hearts and to get people truly on board, aligned and believing in the possibilities of the future. My guest today is Lata Hamilton and she's going to be discussing with us why focusing on the traditional side of change management can create mistrust and frustrations. Now, Lata is a change leadership and confidence expert, author of Pioneer Your Career Change and the creator of the Leading Successful Change Programme. After tripling her salary in just three years to almost $200,000, Her mission is to help millennial women carve their own path for change in career, leadership and life and find the confidence and authenticity to truly earn their worth. Lata has worked with some of Australia's biggest companies on changes that have impacted over 100,000 people. Operating model changes impacting thousands and global cultural transformations and digital transformation that is literally changing the way that we work. Lata, it's such a pleasure to welcome you to Talking with the Tell me a little bit about your background and why you chose change management because I know when I was learning about change management back in the day, You know, it was... 

 Lata | 01:24
Thank you so much, Rose. It's fantastic to be here. 

 Rose | 01:41
Something new, it was a new sort of concept. So what prompted you to get into it? 

 Lata | 01:47
Yeah, it's a great question. I actually started out my corporate career in marketing. And really loved marketing. I had done media and communications at university. 
 So I was working in marketing and a fixed term contract that I was on was coming up to the end. And I had a colleague actually who was project manager and I was working in a bank at the time, one of the big four banks in Australia. And so this colleague, she saw my background in media and communications and in marketing, events, process improvement, compliance. And she said, " you know, I think you'd be great in change management." And I had no idea what it even was, had never heard of it before. And so I went and spoke with a change manager who worked internally and sort of just I had a coffee chat with her and tried to get a bit of an understanding, still a bit hazy on what it was. 
 And then I went to the Change Management Institute networking drinks. It was like their end of year networking drinks. And I spoke to some people there and they were so nice and helpful and supportive and gave great information. And I just remember thinking, if this is the kind of profession that change, sorry, if this is the kind of people that change management attracts, then this is the kind of profession that I want to work in. And so I started applying for roles in change, landed my first role in change. And if anybody, any of your listeners who maybe don't know what organizational change management is, I love to define things really simply. I just say it's moving people from doing things in one way to doing things in a new way in an organization. And we do that through communications, training and business readiness. 
 So making sure they have everything that they need in order to be able to do the change and keep doing it in the future. And yeah, and so it's just been a dream since then. 
 Like I've managed to find a profession that's mixes all of the things, not just my skill sets and my experience and my training, but my passion for people, my passion for results and for benefits and return on investment, for processes. And yeah, people can move to change management from pretty much any profession. You'll have transferable skills. And I just feel very blessed to have found something that I love working in. 

 Rose | 04:00
Wonderful. I love change management. I love to see how organisations can go from one way to another way. However, There are people and there are risks to change management because it does build a lot of mistrust. It does build a lot of frustration, especially if it's not done correctly or in alignment with what the team members are As long as they're engaged and kept informed about what's happening, it's usually a lot smoother. But if they're not and it's a higgledy-piggledy, up-and-down sort of process, then, yeah, it can be horrendous. 

 Lata | 04:40
Absolutely. And sometimes actually, Rose, like... It's not even hickory-pickory up and down. 
 Sometimes it's literally just like overnight forced on people. Like they have not even had any inkling that something was coming. It might be, say, for example, a new system or an upgrade to a system, or it might be a new process or a new product or a new service, and they never even knew about it. They just get handed this thing. It's kind of thrown over the fence and they're expected to just pick it up and know how to use it, know and want to use it and start doing things in the new way. And they literally had like no runway. They had no sort of path to actually get there. 
 So with change management, we want to help people feel informed, inspired, confident and ready for the change ahead. And exactly what you said, you know, communicate early, engage people, bring them on board, get them involved and make sure that they actually know what's coming down the line, that they want to use it, that they know how to use it and that they can keep doing it in the future. 

 Rose | 05:40
Yeah, sometimes, though, once you put all those steps in place, you still have those people who will not change. They will not accept the new way of doing things. And unfortunately, you can't just, you know, fire them. They... And even moving them sideways can be a bit of a challenge. 
 So how do we get around those people who, you know, are really reticent to accept the new change. 

 Lata | 06:06
Absolutely. You've hit the nail on the head. 
 You know, in change management, we often call it sort of like resistance. So resistance to the change or people who are maybe unsure or even actively resisting, which could look like maybe they don't show up to briefings or they don't show up to training or they don't start doing things in the new way. Or when you go live with whatever it is that's changing, like I always use system change because it's very kind of easy for a lot of people to understand. Maybe it's like instead of using the new system, they do workarounds behind the scenes and like, you know, sneaky kind of thing. And you will always have some level of resistance. And I think it's about really understanding what that resistance is, why it's there. But then starting to look at like, how can you engage people in a different way, engage people's hearts and minds to so often in sort of the traditional aspects of change management, the traditional approach to change management, we really take a very kind of logical, rational approach to change. 
 Like I'm going to tell you all the reasons why we need to change. I'm going to create this burning platform for change if we don't do it now. These are all of the problems that can happen and it all makes sense. Absolutely. But when it comes to change management, what's really being triggered is our emotions and what is often being triggered is actually our survival instinct, especially in a workplace, because if you think about it, somebody's job and even just the way that they do their job really directly correlates to their livelihood. It correlates to them being able to put food on the table for themselves and their family, keep a roof over their head, know that they're going to be able to live again sort of tomorrow. 
 So it's triggering that survival instinct. And so when change comes knocking, which is inevitable, It's triggering the survival instinct and then when we say have a saying in neuro-linguistic programming which is what I'm trained in certified in NLP, we say NLP for short. 
 So neuro-linguistic programming which is the study of excellence in behaviour, communications and psychology or our emotions. And we have a saying which is like when emotions increase, intelligence decreases. And so it's not to say that people's IQ goes down, but they pretty much like close their ears to all of those logical rational reasons why they're so stuck in their emotions, they're in such heightened state of their emotions that they literally cannot even compute and, you know, like process the logical, rational reasons why. Which is why we really need to start actually tapping in at a deeper level, tapping into people's hearts and minds and using tools and techniques and ways of approaching the change, messaging the change, training, communicating, engaging. That are actually going to be able to resonate at a really different level. And help to calm people's emotions. But like, and I can share a few examples maybe of how to do that. But what I would say is, taking resistance not as a problem, but instead as an opportunity to be able to take those people, hear their concerns, they might actually have really valid points, really valid concerns to make. And they might just be the vocal ones. There's probably gonna be about 30% of other people who aren't saying anything and just pretending to go along with it. 
 So those people, if you can actually get them on board by taking a different approach to your change management, you can potentially get some of your strongest advocates, people who are in your back pocket, people who are there helping you make your change better, deliver better, create things that are going to resonate with more people more effectively and they can actually become some of your best allies in the change. 

 Rose | 10:02
Absolutely. And I was interested when you were saying, you know, to how to use NLP and coaching techniques. How do How does that work? 
 I mean, I understand what NLP is, but how would you use that in a change management sense? 

 Lata | 10:18
Yeah, so when I got certified in neuro-linguistic programming, I was really learning how to work with people one-on-one. So I had a coaching business and I would use neuro-linguistic programming tools and techniques in order to help people get, you know, success in, I started out as a life coach and then sort of moved more into career coaching specifically. 
 So very powerful techniques that really work on the mental patterns. So the way that our mind thinks and creates meaning and what we want to do is we want to transform the meaning. 
 So a really good example that I like to use is I was working on a project once And I had a stakeholder who was the project manager of this project and she worked in finance. And this project was going to be bringing in some new systems and some new mobile applications on iPads and things like that. 
 So it was about four different systems, an asset management system, financial reporting system, these mobile applications on iPads and just kind of all coming in together. So I asked her, I said, well, what's this change all about? 
 Like, what's it gonna give us? What's it gonna give people? And she said, financial reporting. And like for her, that was perfectly valid response. She's like, I'm a finance person. I want to know the financial reports. We have to do it, you know, every month, every quarter. And so she's like, you know, financial reporting. And I said, okay, but like, what else is it going to give us? That might switch you on, but it's not going to switch on the rest of this organization of like 500 people who are not finance people and who it's actually probably going to break a lot of trust with them because they're going to look at you and go, all you care about is the money. You don't even care about us. 
 You know what I mean? So I use the neuro-linguistic programming technique with her. We're just one-on-one with the conversation. Use this neurolinguistic programming technique. And the technique is called chunking up. And it's a really simple premise. It's just that when things are more high level, more highly chunk, then you can get more agreement. 
 And then when things are more detailed, more specific, more lower chunked or smaller chunked, that's where you get more disagreement, more personal preference. So I... Did this NLP chunking technique with her where I just kept asking her for what purpose? What's the purpose of that? Great. We want financial reporting. For what purpose do we want financial reporting? And I wasn't asking the question why, because that creates listing in your mind. Instead, I was specifically asking for what purpose. What's the highest intention of that? And we ended up having this, going around in circles, having this conversation. She was getting frustrated. I was like pushing on with the process because I knew and believed in it so much and had been using it with my own personal clients. And we finally got to the point where she realized, well, where she came up with, we want the financial reporting because that was a community-based organisation. It was actually a local council and We wanted to be able to make better decisions for the community. 
 So one of the reasons that most people showed up to work was for the community. Like they actually were very community minded, no matter where they worked, whether they were office workers, whether they were outdoor workers, everybody kind of had this real passion for their community. We wanted to be able to make better decisions. 
 So we ended up calling that program, like the name of the program, of the project, we called it Make It Count. And the tagline was empowering better decision making for our community. Every person, every asset, Every dollar, every decision. And so we were able to message and sort of market that change and communicate that change with something that resonated much more broadly across the organization. And, you know, that was like my first instance of bringing NLP into my change management work. And since then, like I've run that process, you know, in vision setting workshops and future state workshops with boards, with C-suites, with executive teams, with senior leaders, with project managers, project teams, like because it's so powerful. 
 So when you're just taking some of these really useful tools and techniques that really tap into people's hearts and minds, you're able to shift what it is that you're focusing on with the change and use and leverage that to get better engagement with the people who are going to be impacted or involved in the change. 

 Rose | 14:41
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that you would find something that is a useful tool for people that might be a little bit resistant or not really knowing why the change needs to happen. So using NLP was just the right technique to use to get the words out about why the change needed to happen. 
 So yeah, it seems like a really good way to do that. Now, when I talked about the importance... Of preparing the team's future work? How do you go about doing that? Not just the managers or the leaders, but the team members on the ground. 

 Lata | 15:20
Yeah, it's going to be, I think, something, Rose, that. Becomes much bigger issue, particularly with the future of work with much more automation coming into organizations, much more artificial intelligence coming into organizations. 
 Like it's not new news that jobs are really gonna be impacted by technology and digital transformation. I've been talking about this for the last five years and a few of the stats were the World Economic Forum in 2020 estimated that 75 million jobs worldwide would be impacted. And in Australia specifically, in 2015, the Committee for Economic Development in Australia estimated that 5 million jobs would be impacted. And we've got a pretty small population here. We're only hitting 30 million. 
 So that's at least 20% of our working population whose jobs are going to be impacted. And so I think with The sheer pace of change and the sheer breadth of what technology changes such as automation and artificial intelligence are going to do. We really need to be setting up our teams for success. And that's not exactly what you said. It's not just leaders. It's not just projects. We need to be actually starting to set all of our teams up with a lot more career ownership so like people who might be more teams on the ground or frontline managers and things like that with more career ownership so that they're not depending necessarily 100% on that organization to tell them where they're going to go next because the truth of the matter is nobody's going to know what the jobs of the future are and where those opportunities are So I think we need to start bringing in much more career empowerment for all. Levels of the organisation, but particularly for some of those frontline staff. And what that will do will actually take the pressure off leaders to have to come up with all of the answers and to have, you know, all the world sitting on their shoulders. 
 So I think that's one thing is sort of much more career empowerment and having people start to own their own career, what those trajectories, career paths, new industries, new roles could look like and start to participate. In that rather than sit back and wait and twiddle their thumbs waiting to be told what role to go into next because nobody like we're not going to know what those roles will be. The other side I think is a level of change acceptance. 
 You know we spoke a little bit about change resistance and The fact that, you know, people are kind of really hardwired to sort of get a little bit mistrustful of change and a bit resistant to change. I think because of the sheer pace of change we need to start having people become much more comfortable with the concept of change and with the pace of change and in the past the traditional model was very much you know like we have peaks and troughs so you know we're going to peak and there's going to be a lot of change and then there'll be a dip and then we'll have you know things will be stable for a while then we're going to bring in the next change peak and trough it's not like that anymore it's just constant now change is just constant. 
 So people don't have that breathing time. So what we need to do is, if you've ever heard the phrase or the saying, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats, we need to raise the level of change acceptance in our organisations, you know, for leaders, for projects, for team members, frontline staff, frontline managers, and even to a certain extent, our community, our clients and our customers. We need to raise the bar and raise the level of change acceptance across the board, to give people almost like that to arm and armor themselves against the inevitable. 

 Rose | 18:59
Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally agree with that. I think, you know, with the way the world is changing at the moment, we have to make sure that we are all equipped to, you know, Because the world could change tomorrow and it might not ever be the same again. We don't know. We don't know what the future holds. And so, yes, as long as we're all equipped from wherever, from the cradle to the grave. Basically, we're all equipped to handle any changes that come up. I think that's got to be a good thing. And the only way we can do that is have the appropriate change managers within not just organisations, but communities as well. They need to be a part of everything that happens. 

 Lata | 19:44
Absolutely agree. 

 Rose | 19:46
If you want more from Lata, you can find her on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. And when you go to her website at latahamilton.com, she is inviting you to download her free underpaid and overlooked coaching action guide. Get her Creative Launch Ideas Guide and you can connect with her, as I said, on LinkedIn and on Facebook and on Instagram. And don't forget to get her book, Pioneer Your Career Change Book at lardahamilton.com forward slash a pioneer. Larda, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me and for sharing all your wisdom with us. 

 Lata | 20:30
You're so welcome. It's been absolutely wonderful to be here. Thank you, Rose. 

 Rose | 20:33
Bye for now. 

 Outro | 20:36
You've been listening to Talking with the Experts with Rose Davidson. The podcast that brings you real stories, bold insights and strategies that work. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast channel so you never miss an episode and dive into our full library anytime at talkingwiththeexperts.com. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing and keep talking with the experts.