Posted on 24 Nov, 2010 -
Taking control of your own hidden motives
Why making changes to our behaviours and habits is almost impossible
Why everything from our eating and relationship habits to the roles we play at work and in life are determined by our ‘immunities’
A fascinating exercise to help you understand what’s preventing you from changing. And doing something about it..
Dear Reader,
This week I’d like you to think of one thing about your behaviour you’d like to change…
... and then invite you to try out a little experiment.
The following exercise is an adaptation of the methods used in the brilliant book: ‘Immunity to Change, How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential In Yourself and Your Organization’ by Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan (a Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at Harvard University).
But before we embark on the experiment, a little background information…
Why even people who are about to die are unable to change to save themselves
An interesting medical study recently showed that if heart doctors tell their patients that they are seriously about to die unless they make changes to their personal life (diet, exercise and smoking), only one in seven are actually able to make the necessary changes.
It’s not because they don’t want to live. It’s not because they don’t want to make those changes. It’s because making changes is even more difficult than we realise.
Why? Here’s what’s at work:
As children growing up in the world, we realise that life is a place full of many challenges, potential pitfalls and terrifying personal risk. In order to try and safeguard ourselves against what we see as some of the worst dangers, we create a number of ‘commitments’ to ourselves in order to try and make ourselves ‘immune’ to these risks.
Some examples of such commitments might be:
‘To have things done my way!’
‘To be liked by everybody’
‘To avoid being abandoned again’
‘To never feel bored’
‘To avoid ever feeling stupid’
‘Not to take risks’
‘To not ever feel or be out of control’
Why these personal commitments are so good but yet so bad
Now, the interesting thing with these ‘immunities’ as the authors call them is that they are often a set of brilliantly effective commitments that have helped us survive life and succeed in many ways.
The first commitment above, for example, belonged to a highly successful business owner who had built up his own multi-billion dollar financial services company. This attitude of always wanting things to be done his own way and believing that his way of doing it would always be best had given him the strength to go it alone and build his business. They were also exactly the commitments, however, that were preventing him from achieving his new behavior goals of learning to delegate more and be more receptive to new ideas.
The truth, in fact, is that in many cases we will be unable to change our behaviour in the way we wish unless we understand the contradicting commitments that are preventing us from changing or behaving in new ways.
We can try as much as we like, for example, to stop snacking between meals or overeating… but if we have contradictory commitments such as ‘to not allow myself to feel bored’… ‘to not being seen as a sexual object’… ‘to never feel empty’… ‘to always accept food as a sign as love whenever it is offered’… then it will be extremely difficult to find against this immunity unless we come to recognise it for what it is and challenge it.
So how do we find out what our personal commitments or immunities are?
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Start by writing down your goal for behavior change. The more you really want to achieve this change the more likely you are to succeed. You are also more likely to succeed if you feel that you will be putting someone or something you love or care about at risk if you do not change.
2. Next, write a long list of some of the specific things you do or don’t do at the moment that work against your goal. The more you can list and the more detail you can give the better. Instead of just saying ‘I avoid other people’s company’ for example, you could say ‘When I see somebody I know in the street, I pretend that I haven’t seen them’ and ‘If I’m invited to a party I pretend that I can’t make it’ etc. etc. List at least 10 if you can.
3. Now, have a read through your list and for each of the things you’ve written, ask yourself this question:
QUESTION: “If I imagine myself trying to do the opposite of this, what is the most uncomfortable or worrisome or outright scary feeling that comes up for me?”
Jot down everything you come up with until you find one or several things that stop you in your tracks and makes you thing ‘wow!’. These things should make you feel quite strongly and sometimes weirdly or oddly spooked. Something deep that goes into the core.
4. Your commitment or your ‘immunity’ are the ideas you will have formed over the years in order to try and make yourself immune from these deep-seated fears.
Discovering what your personal assumptions are
What you can also go onto discover once you’ve unearthed what your immunity or your commitments are is the assumptions you make that have such a strong influence on your behavior.
Looking at the above list of specific actions, for example, this person’s fear might be of not being liked. The background ‘assumptions’ they’re unconsciously making in their life might be things like ‘I assume that the odd person not liking me that much is a terrible thing’ or ‘I assume that if I can avoid getting close to people then I will feel happier’.
And putting them to the test
Getting to the bottom of the way we work as individuals can take a bit of time and effort but the results you get can have a HUGE impact on your life. Even the tiniest little discovery about your own mind and the defences you’ve built up against life can act like a small push sending a rowing boat off in a new direction.
But in which direction do you head now with what you’ve learnt today?
According to this brilliant book (to which I have only been able to do small justice today), the next step you need to take towards achieving your goals for change is to design tests to challenge your Big Assumptions.
“The purpose of each test you run is to see what happens when you intentionally alter your usual conduct and then reflect upon the meaning of the results for your big assumption.”
Your goal at this stage is not to change your action yet but to collect data to help you either confirm or revise your big assumptions.
Well, that should keep you busy for a while!
Enjoy your discoveries and the rest of the week ahead.
