The Invisible Battle: Why Self-Protection Always Wins (And How to Change That).
We are a few weeks out from New Year's, and you know what that means…committing to a series of New Year's resolutions that you make progress on, but by around March, you’re back where you started.
And if you’re one of the outliers who maintain this consistent progress, I celebrate you but still urge you to continue reading.
The question is, why is it so hard to make change stick despite a genuine intention?
The answer lies in Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan’s book called Immunity to Change. They explain that we continue trying to solve adaptive challenges with technical solutions.
What do they mean by technical and adaptive challenges?
As you can see, a technical challenge has a known solution and focuses on behaviour. The adaptive dimension goes into the inner landscape—the thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions we hold to be true. Often, we need both technical and adaptive means to make the change, but if we only apply the technical means, we can't make it stick.
Take the most typical New Year's resolution, like weight loss. The technical solution is to eat correctly, minimize your sugar, fat, and alcohol intake, exercise regularly, and get more sleep.
We know weight loss is not that simple; otherwise, we would all be supermodels with six-pack abs.
It is the adaptive dimension that trips us up. For example, when I have clients who struggle to exercise, I ask them, "What do you associate with exercise?" Often, they will tell me it’s painful and feels like punishment. When it comes to eating better, they fear being hungry and feeling like they’re missing out on their favourite foods, so eating correctly equals punishment.
Even if they lose the weight, the bigger fear is gaining it back and appearing like a failure to their friends and colleagues.
These observations are not always obvious to the person; they need to be uncovered through skilful questioning and coaching.
How can you start to make change stick?
Kegan and Lahey share their formula in their book, which has four steps to the Immunity to Change process. Here is a summarised and condensed version of this model, it would normally take an hour with an individual and at least three to four hours with a team.
Step 1: Identify your improvement goal.
This is simple enough. It is something you want to get better at, which will dramatically improve your life and happiness. For example, I am committed to getting better at saying no and setting boundaries.
Failure to stick to this goal results in fatigue, resentment, stress and even burnout.
Step 2: What are you doing or not doing that works against your improvement goal?
Now, you must identify the behaviours you are doing or not doing that contradict this goal. It cannot be an emotion or a feeling; if I had a video team follow you for the day, what would I see? Here are some examples:
If your goal was to speak up more in meetings rather than say, "I get anxious," what would anxious look like? Perhaps it means you withdraw, your self-talk tells you to keep quiet, and you remain silent.
Here are some examples of the person who wants to say no and set boundaries:
I work overtime.
I take on work responsibilities that are not mine.
I don’t hold people accountable and do not push back on substandard work.
I take on other people’s responsibilities, so it is done to my standards.
I attend all meetings I am invited to and do not question the relevance of them.
I don't delegate meeting responsibilities to other team members.
I work during time allocated to my personal time and gym time.
I don’t manage expectations; I just say yes.
I don’t question the travel schedule or request online meetings as an alternative.
The point is not to judge yourself or feel bad but to name the behaviours without emotion to see how they contradict your improvement goal. Keep it factual, and don’t explain why you do these things.
This is not easy, and it feels uncomfortable to name, but if you stick with the process, it will reveal a bigger truth that often lies dormant.
We have an inner conflict.
What is revealed here is that we have an opposing goal and behaviour. I want to say no and set boundaries, but I am executing actions that contradict the goal, even though it is genuine. The question is why?
For behaviours to exist, they must serve a bigger purpose, which means that they are acting out of protection towards a hidden goal. Even though it remains hidden for now, it doesn't make it any less important to us.
Step 3: Identify the hidden competing goals.
Now, we start to move into the adaptive dimension of change and go "under the hood of the car" to reveal why these column two behaviours exist.
In this step, if you imagine yourself doing the opposite of your column two goals, what fears or worries come up for you? When you put yourself in this situation, what thoughts, beliefs or fears do you experience?
The most common fears that are generated in this column include:
Fear of losing status or respect
Fear of not being enough
Fear of losing belonging or connection
Fear of appearing incompetent or a failure
Fear of appearing vulnerable
Fear of losing control over a situation
Fear of losing a desired image of how you want to show up or creating a dreaded image
In the example of saying no and setting boundaries, the fears that come up for this person are:
I worry I will be seen as lazy.
I worry I will be seen as not enough.
I worry I will be perceived as uncommitted and not pulling my weight.
I worry I will not be viewed as a team player if I don’t work these ridiculous hours.
I worry about what people think of me.
I worry people will speak badly about me and perceive me negatively.
Even more than the fears, there is a hidden competing commitment to self-protection. Now you convert your worries into a commitment statement:
I am committed to never being seen as lazy.
I am committed to always being seen as enough.
I am committed to always being seen as committed and pulling my weight.
I am committed to always being viewed as a team player and matching their work schedules.
I am committed to being more concerned about what others think o of me.
I am committed to people speaking positively about me.
We dedicate so much energy to this commitment to self-protection that we completely negate our column one goal because our energy is ensuring we stay 'safe' from these fears.
What we see is our psychological immune system. The immune system is designed to keep us safe and block out ‘enemies’ from contaminating the body. But sometimes, the immune system gets it wrong. For example, if someone has a heart transplant, the body may first reject it because it perceives the new heart as a threat rather than something life-saving.
It’s the same with us in column three. Although column one is going to be healthy for us and almost life-saving, this psychological immune system sees it as a threat to our safety.
Lahey and Kegan say that at this point of the exercise, we have one foot on the gas, which is our improvement goal, and one foot on the break, which is your hidden commitment. The result is the status quo, and you are going nowhere.
As much as you have a pure intention for your improvement goal, it cannot be achieved solely by focusing attention on the behaviour itself without the adaptive dimension.
Step 4: Revealing your hidden assumptions.
An assumption is a belief you hold to be true, but an assumption without investigation can also be false and influence your behaviours and how you view the world.
In this final step, ask yourself: what am I assuming about the situation that holds my column 3 commitments in place? In other words, if I imagine doing my column two behaviour, what bad thing would happen?
In the example of saying no and setting boundaries, the assumptions are:
I assume that there is no other way to succeed other than working these long hours.
I assume that this is the norm; it cannot be another way.
I assume that I will be perceived negatively if I make time for myself and am not ‘always on’.
Once you can see your big assumption and name it, you can begin to investigate it. Rather than using these assumptions as the filters through which you make decisions or see the world, step back from them and get curious.
Pick up the 'lenses' off your face and examine them from all angles. The key here is to move from willpower to curiosity to move ahead with your goals.
Is this assumption always true? What if it’s not true? Often, we create these assumptions from beliefs earlier in life as a protection mechanism, but does this belief serve you today? Is it holding you back now?
The big assumption is the lever to make change possible because once you can 'soften' your attachment to it, you can begin to explore and be open to other possibilities.
For example, someone who wants to get better at public speaking has a big assumption that the presentation must be a 'performance'. Another assumption is that if no one asks questions, then I failed. Reading this, I am sure you agree that these are not true.
If you believe it has to be a performance, no wonder you get anxious and place too much pressure on yourself.
This process is incredible with teams working towards a common improvement goal. In a past workshop, an assumption was revealed: If I am not putting out fires all the time and maintaining a culture of chaos, then I won't be seen as valuable.
Testing the big assumption.
Once you make the invisible visible, you can start to make different choices.
Now it is time to test your big assumption by starting to collect data and, over time, proving it isn’t as accurate as you believe.
For example, the person who assumes there is no other way to succeed other than grinding long hours—her test was to commit to two padel games a week at 6 p.m., which she used to do.
It felt so uncomfortable at first because she was convinced the world would fall apart if she weren’t there to check emails or be 'on standby'.
What she found miraculous was that no one fell behind, no one judged her, and she loved playing padel and being social. She was happier and more fulfilled in her work without this limiting assumption and learned it is possible to have both.
For the person who believes he must perform every time he presents, he decided that rather than fit into a mould of how he should present; he went in prepped but stuck to his style, which was more conversational and engaged the audience with questions.
To his surprise, it worked because he was being authentic and not comparing himself to others.
I'm not saying testing these assumptions is easy; it's a deep dive into your courage zone, but the rewards are well worth the initial discomfort.
Now what…
Making New Year's resolutions is positive because it is a way to create a fresh start and clarify the behaviours you want to change.
Rather than relying on intention alone to change and only focusing on the behaviour in isolation, get curious and delve into the adaptive dimension.
Have you tried losing weight before? What worked and what didn’t? When did you start to make progress? When did you fall off the wagon? What triggered you - was it when you started to see progress? Was there equally a fear of success and failure?
Now, go through the Immunity to Change process and give yourself the gift of self-compassion to be real and honest about what may be blocking you from making the changes you want. It is not because you lack discipline or are lazy; it is because you are committed to a self-protection goal that is not visible to you yet.
When you make the invisible visible, you can start to change because now you can see it where before it was autopilot.
The main difference between a technical challenge and an adaptive one is that technical focuses on behaviour alone. When you bring in the adaptive dimension to your goals, you can get to the heart of why it is hard to change and how to do it differently so it sticks.
This takes time because those column three fears and beliefs have been with you for a long time. Start small and give yourself the gift of grace when you default to old behaviours. True growth is being able to catch yourself sooner and then course-correct accordingly.
Here's to making this a New Year with a difference.
Warm wishes,
Lori