In their career of researching change behaviour, Harvard Psychologists Drs Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey found most of us have a psychological immunity to change whereby we unconsciously resist change to protect and maintain hidden mindsets and competing commitments. What we perceive as self-sabotaging behaviours are often natural defence mechanisms, resisting threats to our core identity and worldview.

Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change X-Ray tool uses a four-step approach that surfaces and shifts behaviour through self-examination and installing more conscious and constructive beliefs.

We start with a developmental goal and identify behaviours working against it. What are we doing (or not doing) that is blocking us from achieving our goal? Kegan and Lahey compare this incongruency to having one foot on the accelerator and another on the brake – our wheels are spinning and we’re expelling plenty of energy but essentially going nowhere.

Example: Jill has a goal of delegating more work to her team. Her behaviours include working long hours to get work done, sacrificing personal activities, taking on new tasks without considering her current workload, no tasking for help.

We then explore how it would feel to engage in the opposite behaviour. This is where the magic happens as unconscious anxieties are unearthed; our fear of failure, of letting people down, of being seen as incompetent and so on. At a psychological level, we are committed to avoiding these feelings and situations thus driving oppositional or sabotaging behaviour. This is our hidden immunity to change.

Example: Jill fears she will be seen as incompetent and incapable if she doesn’t get the work done or declines more work, she will feel guilty if she pursues personal activities, she fears her team won’t do a good a job and this will reflect poorly on her.

Revealing these competing commitments requires us to dig deep into our consciousness to see how our ego and identity is running our behaviour. Most of us are either partially or fully blind to these self-sabotaging mechanisms. The joy and relief that many people experience when they connect with these insights is truly inspiring.

Finally, we review the assumptions underpinning our hidden commitments. Those ideologies we accept as absolute truths that sustain and anchor the very perception of who we are and how the world operates.

Example: Jill assumes if she asks for help she will be seen as vulnerable and incompetent, she believes her capacity to take on and execute tasks is what makes her valuable and prioritising her personal needs will appear selfish and superficial.

By identifying and testing assumptions, we can better understand and modify self-defeating behaviours to effect lasting change. This process expands and elevates our level of mental complexity, enabling a more agile and adaptive response to change. I incorporate the wonderful work of Byron Katie to help clients see and test their stories. By identifying and testing assumptions, we can better understand and modify self-defeating behaviours to effect lasting change.

Taking on adaptive challenges and revealing what stops us from changing, challenges our self-concepts and forces us to face our ego and shadowy thoughts. This can be confronting but also transformational. 

Read the next article in this series on Does our ego drive change resistance?