Integral Life Coaching

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Our Immunity to Change: My interpretation of this adult development model

How many times have we wanted to change a behavior, mindset, or habit, and we weren’t able to do it? We had the motivation for the change. We even started it but have yet to actualize the change we wanted.

Our immunity to change is as physiological as psychological. Our reptilian part of the brain – the brain stem – is designed to see change as a threat. We are instinctively wired to survive; therefore, our body – below our awareness – constantly searches for danger but desires safety.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey gathered their many years of research on adult human development in a book titled “Immunity to Change.” 

They explain how the desire to change or having insight into our behavior that needs change is not enough. 

I translate that to knowing my need to change intellectually is the first step. It’s when I read and listen and recognize my limitations. Then there is a path to the embodiment of the change to make it second nature. 

It is a learning process. It’s different from learning mathematics or a new SW application. This is learning our transformational skills, as Kegan and Lahey put it. 

The learning process can be viewed this way:

         

   Photo surce: https://www.zen-tools.net/stages-of-learning.html

It is an iterative process that takes a while. It is also easier to do it with outside support to see the achievements in the process and receive feedback. This is where a support group or a life coach can help. 

I recently finished “Immunity to Change.” It is a comprehensive model that could help various personality types. There are many models that we coaches apply to empower our clients to make the change they want. The goal in coaching is to select a suitable model for the combination of personality and circumstances to allow the learning process to take place and unlock the client’s potential.

This is how this model works; By filling out the chart below, we can create a picture and a plan for our path to change.

  From the book Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey

Column 1- Commitment (improvement goals): Think about the most challenging part of your life and ask yourself, what would be the most critical change in me that can improve my contribution to this challenge? What behavior is limiting you from being yourself in this challenge? If you feel comfortable, ask for feedback from those involved or who know about your life challenge. 

Column 2 – Doing/not Doing: These are our behaviors. What am I doing against this goal? If you’d like, make this column private. The more honest you are with yourself, the better results you will gain. But the goal is not to shame yourself. For example, I fall into people-pleaser mode under the fear of conflict. I agree even if I don’t like a situation, then I feel resentment. I listen to learn what people want to do and forget my own wants and needs. I don’t want to upset people by pushing them out of their comfort zone. I compromise my desires and sometimes my needs. 

Column 3 – Hidden competing commitments and the worry box: Hidden commitments are part of our psychological immune system to keep us safe. These are our rescuers from old dangers. We needed to adopt these worries as our defense mechanism, especially when we were young. They can be based on old threats. 

What we write here can be unexpected for us. We need to stay non-judgmental about what comes out and practice self-acceptance. These are our self-doubts, criticizing inner voice, and worries that have become so natural in our mind that recognizing them may take a while. 

The first three columns show us our immunities to change. Take time to fill out the first three columns. Returning to each one and modifying it as you learn more about yourself. After filling out the first 3 columns, we begin to see the contradictions between our improvement goal and the hidden commitments. One sign of having a clear picture from these columns is when we feel uncomfortable by learning about some of our behavior that contradicts our improvement goal. 

Column 4 – Big assumption: These are our mindsets and beliefs. Here we learn that reducing or eliminating our behavior, hidden commitments, or mindset abruptly will not work. They are our defense mechanism and have served a purpose in the old days, but they have become a pattern in our subconscious and stayed there with us even when there is no longer any danger. Are those old threats and dangers still relevant? Danger could be feeling ashamed, belittled, bullied, unloved, ostracized, etc. 

First SMART Experiment: Designing a relatively safe experiment on our big assumption is essential. This is only research about our assumption and not a self-development step yet. This is only a test. Its result is only for learning purposes. Design it for a safe yet challenging environment to see whether your assumptions are correct. A good test conforms to the S-M-A-R-T criteria where S is for safe, M is for modest, A is for actionable, R is for research stand (the test’s purpose), and T is for the test. 

Running the test: After we run the test, we need some reflection. Taking notes on what I did, what happened, whether there was any feedback, did I gather quality data (not based on my own assumption from other people’s heads), and what does the data say about my big assumption? 

Designing a New Test & Hooks and Release: Here, the iterative process allows us safely and step by step to move towards a new pattern of beliefs and behavior. We are firing neurons in a safe way to allow them to wire together and become our new neural paths for our new behavior. There is a saying that neurons that fire together wire together. 

This blog is a simplified version of the model. It also focuses on an individual’s development. However, practicing this way of learning, especially as an iterative process, can bring a new opening to our lives and allow us to confidently approach growth. The model also offers group development, especially for leadership and organizations. In that version, the authors provide insight into how different personalities can work together with curiosity and non-judgmental behavior. 

If you’d like to learn more about adult vertical development and self-growth, please visit my website and blogs at www.shabnamcurtis.net 

Schedule a complimentary conversation here to allow me to bring you more light on effective self-growth models.

Everyone is searching for more connections to life. Everyone has a different path. Be you and keep going. 

Shabnam Curtis

Here is a great video that explains Immunity to Change Model by the author.

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Self-Deception: Do We All Do It? Is It Good, Bad, or Both?

(1526 words)

Self-deception has been a recent mind-provoking concept to me. I needed to read and write about it. How we lie to ourselves and accept the lies and overtime we believe they are the truth and not the root of our sufferings. 

With self-deception, we try to hide our flaws and make a good self-image that makes us feel like a better person.

But don’t we often say, “Fake it to make it”? Are there occasions that self-deception can play a positive role? When old beliefs create a barrier and try to convince me that I am not good enough and I believe it because I don’t know better, maybe fake confidence can help me to break through the barriers! 

Self-deception like any other phenomena in life has both sides of the coin. It’s that how we draw the truth from either side.

Bringing a systematic and integral approach to self-deception, we want to be able to recognize the act of self-deception and bring a perspective to it to see the bigger picture. The bigger the perspective becomes, the better it shows us that we don’t have to be fake, and our real self is as accepted as possible. We will be able to see that everyone has flaws and that is just simply being human or any creature. Do we question a tree’s appearance because of a few dried branches? 

In an integral approach, we see ourselves as part of a bigger system and try to remind ourselves of the interconnection between us and the system we live in, the impacts of the system on us and the impacts we create on the system.

If I lie and pretend to myself and others that I am wealthy, then others’ expectations will be different, and I have to lie more every day. If I pretend that I am physically strong while really feeling weak and tired, others count on me as strong and when I break, it impacts others’ lives who counted on my support. If I pretend that I am always right and never make a mistake, after a while other people don’t trust me and my relationships become shallow, and I feel lonely. If I deny any tension in a relationship and pretend everything is smooth, would the tension go away? How about the wrong relationship I stayed in longer that I should have? We know the true answer to most of these questions but there are many times we prefer to be self-deceiver and choose a shortcut to avoid being distracted from our distractions in life; especially when we think we know everything!

And not only that, despite the quick gratification we gain, constant lying to ourselves could create anxiety and release excess cortisol and adrenaline that impact the health of our nerve system and physical being. It takes away the energy that we could spend on actualizing more of our potential. 

In dealing with self-deception, we could live with outdated beliefs and values. So, we may force our environment to follow us or at least we make it uncomfortable for others who have other beliefs and values. Our outdated beliefs create habits that are mostly disturbing, and we think our beliefs are the truth.

In the 70s and 80s working long hours and being busy on a job was established as a value to be a great employee. Today newer generations value work-life balance and would like to get more out of their potential in different ways other than focusing only on their jobs. How many of us deal with this conflict of value in our work environment? 

Self-deception has so many layers of complexity especially when it reaches some life routines. I know my cell phone that I touch every minute of my life is made of material that is mined by child-labor, I look for opportunities to raise voice and support organizations against child-labor. And yet, I need a newer phone because I live in a society that is filled with status-oriented advertisements that falsely convince me a happy life full of merchandize is what I need! Is it? You see the paradox? 

How about voting for a political figure who could create more harm for the society as a whole but do one good thing in the small community I live in?

You see how complicated it could be especially under the current economic system we live in!?

Anyway, self-deception is a self-defense mechanism that is supposedly to make us feel better about our life. But it doesn’t work, it back lashes, and eventually makes us feel dissatisfied, uncomfortable, and even unsafe.

Here are examples of self-deception mechanisms that we subconsciously and habitually use in our everyday life. This is extracted from Self Deception – Part 2 – 60+ Self-Deception Mechanisms by Actualized.org:

  • I think I got reality figured out
  • I think my mind never lies to me
  • Underestimating the power of self-deception in my everyday life
  • Current science is all the fact and if I don’t understand something scientifically it doesn’t exist
  • Or I believe in all of thoughts my mind creates.

In his book Thinking, Fast & Slow, Daniel Kahneman says, “The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.” In simpler words it means we assume our perception of the world is the ultimate reality and there is no other reality other than what we see. Where, in fact, there are countless realities or aspects of a reality based on people’s perception.

Our perception – explained in How Emotions Are Made book review – is constructed based on our survival beliefs – many of them have been shaped as our cognitive biases, life experiences, distorted memories, cultural norms, and social realities, which are usually very subjective and narrow. Kendra Cherry explains the cognitive biases and how to deal with them in this article very well. It is up to us to take responsibility and bring those unconscious biases to the consciousness of our lives.

The more we can clean our lenses to reality and practice self-awareness, the better we can work on the self-deception beliefs in our life. We can enhance our perceptions. It is a lifelong practice that we need to commit to with self-compassion. The gentler we are with ourselves, the better we see the beliefs that lead us to lying to ourselves. Then with more self-kindness and self-acceptance, we can try to gradually change those beliefs and their related habits. Small

steps are always more doable and eventually will make a long path. The more we bring our subconscious to the light of consciousness, the freer we live. 

And why self-compassion? Because research studies show that self-deception could be mostly based on subconscious beliefs and even part of our biological evolution to survive that is witnessed in other mammals too. So, let’s be kind to ourselves and find how we can contribute to the rest of the evolutionary process since in so many cases, self-deception no longer serves us. It probably did as a survival mechanism many thousand years ago, but it is time to begin the change to survive in the new era. It is beyond me and you and belongs to all of us. Let’s all try to do our best. Evolution continues… 

We just have to make sure we don’t mistake self-compassion with justifying our deceiving behavior. 

Here is my suggestion to deal with this phenomenon. Next time we hear the soft voice coming from our hearts on any of our actions, let’s pay attention to it rather than silencing it. Look at the questions below. Allow the voice to get louder by contemplating on these questions.

Repeating this cycle and answering these questions can widen our perspective to help changing our old habits and obsolete beliefs over time. Using our analytical skills and critical thinking will help us to make a better world for ourselves. Don’t worry about doing it perfectly the first time. Just try your best and repeat it every time you hear the inner voice. Listen to it. Awareness is the first step. We can do it! 

Awareness part:

  • Am I experiencing a powerful unpleasant feeling? Am I uncomfortable?
  • Am I feeling like a victim?
  • Am I feeling guilty?
  • Am I feeling powerless?
  • Am I feeling too anxious about the matter?
  • Am I trying to change someone else?
  • Am I responsible for any part of this problem?
  • Am I justifying my action feeling a short-lived pleasure or confidence?
  • Am I self-deceiving?

Analysis part:

  • What does my reaction say about me? 
  • How can I see other aspects of this event? From others’ point of view? Imagining different outcomes?
  • How much do I know about other characters in this story? (If there are any)
  • Is my action along with my values? My morality?
  • What habits are behind it?
  • What beliefs support those habits?
  • Do I agree with those beliefs?
  • Where do I sense it in my body?
  • What can I do? What skills do I need to develop to change those beliefs? What’s the next first small step for me?

I will be honored, if I can be a help as a coach to company you through this journey.

Including a few good links to read and watch on the concept of self-deception:

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Self-Deception 23/30 The Problem of Not Knowing You Have a Problem

To get more to the philosophical side of it, read Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Self Deception

Seeing it from Jungian analyst point of view as the Trickster archetype 

Let’s create more clarity on our reality,

Shabnam

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