About The Change Gym

Hi, I’m Steve Barlow, a Director of The Change Gym.

I want to help you understand what we do as a company and how we may be able to help you. So, let me tell you a little of our story.

The Change Gym grew out of some work I was doing over a decade ago. I had been working in the NSW correctional system running programs to help inmates engage in positive personal change. Over a period of 7 years I coached about 3000 men.

This experience helped me understand that even if you had the best programs in the world, they won’t work for some people. Some people resist change no matter how you try to engage them. And yet for other people, mediocre programs can be effective. Now, it’s obviously better to have good programs, but on their own, good programs aren’t enough.

I guess most program deliverers know that programs work better for some people than for others. That’s a kind of insider knowledge – if you deliver change programs you know what both engagement and resistance look like. But it’s much harder to know what’s going on inside the heads of people who receive the programs. What causes them to engage or resist and, more importantly, what is it they bring to programs that makes them effective?

I didn’t really have answers to these questions, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know because, if I could identify what the secret ingredient was, then perhaps I could make better use of it and help people develop more of it. So, I went back to university, enrolled in a PhD program and 6 years later I had some answers. The Change Gym was born out of a desire to share these answers with others.

We are involved in the management of personal and organisational change, but we are not primarily a management company. We certainly have strengths in developing and implementing change programs, but our main strength relates to what happens in the minds of people who will be most affected by the changes. No matter how good your programs are or how skilled your change managers, stakeholders must be ready to engage with change programs if they are to succeed.

They say that knowledge is power. I’m here to tell you that knowing how to unlock change fitness and change readiness is the secret to powerful and effective change programs. This is what we know most about, and we have developed pathways to help you gain the knowledge you need.

Remember this: you need great programs, but you also need great people to make those programs work. Learning about change fitness and change readiness helps you discover who those people are, and how to help others become those people.

When you apply change fitness and change readiness principles to your change projects, you can expect to see more engagement, less resistance, and improved change outcomes. You can expect to see more agile and adaptable employees and an organisational culture that accepts and embraces change.

So, that’s who we are, where we’ve come from, and what we do. And we’d love to be part of your future. When change-fit and change-ready stakeholders engage with great change programs, the future is worth getting excited about. So, if you’re ready to say good-bye to change fatigue, disengagement, and resistance, why not check out what we’ve got to say?