Uncover Your The Hidden Barrier to Growth - Immunity to Change

I was about to step on stage in front of 300 pro-democracy activists, many people I admire, to kick off a three-day conference. I was committed to honoring their work by being clear, concise, insightful, and occasionally entertaining. This meaningful opportunity filled me with excitement and fear. Fear? Where was this fear coming from? While I wanted to be an excellent speaker, I had a less obvious goal: to avoid public embarrassment. These two goals were at odds: thriving versus self-protection.

We all have these hidden competing goals that create fear-based barriers to change, growth, and action. This is our own “Immunity to Change”. How does it work? How can we address it as we, as individuals, confront change?

Understanding Immunity to Change: Core Ideas

This well-researched & practical concept was created by Harvard Prof. Robert Kegan:

🧗 Life-long development: We don’t see the world around us objectively, but we make sense of it based on our personal experiences, beliefs, and values. Adult development is a continuous process of meaning-making and self-transformation. Your mind keeps developing your whole life!

👤 Self-Evolution: Our old reflexes & brain patterns that evolved throughout millenniums to keep us alive are often keeping us from developing today. Human evolution is slower than our social evolution, so we must learn how to evolve ourselves through our lives.

🫣 Hidden Competing Commitments: Our progress is often hindered not by a lack of desire but by unseen fears and beliefs that act against our conscious goals.

🗺️ Immunity to Change Map: Writing down what aspirations we have (goals), then writing down all the behaviors that we exhibit that prevent us from reaching those goals, will enable us to explore fears and assumptions that might hold us back.

Practical Applications: Immunity to Change Map

The key is to be super-honest with yourself in this exercise:

Step 1: Identify Your Improvement Goal - Identify a habit or a behavior that you want to change. Something very important to you.

Example goals: Stop smoking, start working out, be more assertive, start your own business, etc.

Step 2: Reflect on Contradictory Behaviors - Now that you have a clear goal, it's time to list at least 3 behaviors that are preventing you from reaching that goal.

Example: Instead of starting my own business, I keep delaying it; I keep rescheduling the meeting with my business mentor; I don’t put time on my calendar to work on my business idea/plan.

Step 3: Uncover Hidden Commitments: Investigate what fears or beliefs might be blocking your path. What is the worst that could happen if you pursue your goal? What if you talked to that mentor, or carved out time to work on your business plan? What are you afraid of?

Example (a hidden fear): If I do what I need to do and try to start my business, I will learn that I’m incompetent, not able to start a business, and everyone will think I’m a fraud and a failure.

Step 4: Challenge Your Big Assumptions - Now it's time to Test your limiting beliefs through small, controlled experiments. How can you start learning more about your fear? How can you start testing your assumption to see if it's even that bad/real?

Example: I will first schedule that meeting with my business mentor and share my idea with her.

Plan a small test that you could take to learn more about your fear. The goal is to get to action, and do something that is not too big and scary at the beginning, but it does allow you meaningful learning.

Step 5: Adopt a Growth Mindset - View change as a journey of self-discovery and embrace it wholeheartedly. It takes time so be patient with yourself.

Even seemingly harmful behaviors have rational reasons behind them. Maybe those behaviors, learned from experiences, culture, or family, were once beneficial. Immunity to change is a system that we created to keep us alive. Just like our health immunity, our mental immunity can overreact, over-protect, and even hurt us. Uncovering it helps identify reasons why we behave like that. It helps us uncover hidden assumptions about the world and ourselves which could be untrue, or partially true. Even if these assumptions are true, once we can see them clearly, we can decide if we are ready to deal with the consequences needed for change.

What once protected you might be in your way today. What hidden commitments are holding you back? How can you challenge your assumptions today to unlock growth tomorrow?

Nikola

📚 Book Recommendation

If you want to dive deeper into the Immunity to Change map, check out the book "Immunity to Change"! It's a guide that not only helps you understand the complex mechanics of change but also equips you with practical tools to embark on a journey of personal evolution.

If you have less time, you can start with this article by Prof. Kegan and Prof. Lahey: The Real Reason People Won’t Change