Overcoming Resistance to Change
As the year is well underway, I thought I would tackle the topic of overcoming resistance to change; this is a topic that has unlocked a lot of energy and benefit for clients.
Have you wondered why, despite your best intentions to improve in a certain area of your life or leadership (e.g., listening better, public speaking, doing less and thinking more, delegating, networking), you find yourself not able to make meaningful progress, leaving you feeling stuck and wondering what is going on?
Understanding your body’s immunity to change may provide the clue, and with this awareness, you will be better equipped to make the changes you want. So, what is immunity to change and where does this work originate?
Immunity to change is when we make an outward conscious commitment to change an element of our behaviour but struggle internally to make it happen. Professor Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, following years of research, developed this body of work to help adults and leaders overcome their innate human resistance to change (a phenomenon they call immunity to change).
In a nutshell, the idea is that we are complex beings that have an inbuilt protection system that operates by default when we feel fearful or anxious. This often kicks in when we consciously commit to an improvement goal that challenges us to grow outside our comfort zone. As we set out to do things differently, we step out of our comfort zone and our anxiety or fear of the unknown rises. Metaphorically, this is like putting our foot on the accelerator of the car. The experience of anxiety is a signal that our internal energy system is starting to feel unsafe. In response, we pull back by putting our foot on the metaphorical brake of the car. Change fails to occur because we are living in a contradiction: we want to make a change and we want to feel safe at the same time. As the authors say, we have our foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. This is not because we are insincere or lack discipline or willpower, but rather because we are experiencing an underlying hidden fear, and as a consequence, at a deeper, less conscious level, we react to protect ourselves.
Since we tend to focus change mostly on our conscious behaviour, we might beat ourselves up when what is actually required is a deeper look beyond the surface of our stated intentions. When we do so, we discover other less obvious or hidden behaviours that we are also committed to at the same time. This is like taking a kind of mental x-ray of our mindset that shows us how we perceive things at the moment, why they are like they are, and what will need to change to bring significant results.
For example, many clients struggle with taking on too much work themselves and finding it hard to say no to others requests of them, delegating too little, and leaving them limited time to think, strategise, and operate at a higher level. Take Anna, one such client, who discovered that when she set about blocking time in her calendar for strategic work, she would give the time away to other tasks and activities (busy work) or succumb to others’ requests of her by justifying why she could not do otherwise. In exploring beneath the surface, she was deeply committed to being helpful and not selfish, and had always been the problem solver in her family of origin. The anxiety she experienced when she tried to create space for her own work by saying no to others left her feeling unsafe and anxious. She believed that saying no would make her seem selfish and unhelpful, which would result in her alienating others and failing in her role. What she discovered when she tested this assumption was that when she said no, others in her team were stretched to discover their own resourcefulness, and that this in fact was less selfish than always being the fixer. By growing her own team’s skills and accountability, she was in fact perceived as more helpful and less self-oriented. She was also able to see that when she used her time deliberately and less reactively and created boundaries by pushing back, everyone benefited and grew, and this unlocked energy not only in her own internal system but in her team's system as well. As energy trapped in her immune system was released, she experienced feelings of increasing competence and control.
Each one of us is a complex system that has energy within it for change, but sometimes this energy gets trapped inside the system, and being able to find a lever to open and release the trapped energy can make all the difference. Uncovering your big assumptions that have you doing the very opposite of what you intend, will help you to challenge and test those assumptions and develop a new expansive way of seeing things and this will help you see new possibilities to act differently.
In a talk by Lisa Lahey last year, at the conscious business summit, she emphasised that this approach is not a willpower model of change but rather a curiosity model of change. Willpower cannot sustain you when you have an assumption that works against your will. I am sure this will resonate with many of you; it did me. The old willpower approach is neither sustainable nor enjoyable and in the face of complexity, we can all be seduced by oversimplification of how to change. Kegan and Lahey argue this is like using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel.
What is required in our complex modern world is adaptive change where the way we think and see things needs to evolve to overcome the blind spots and limitations of our current sense making so we can manage greater and greater complexity. According to the authors, it is unfortunate that much focus in leadership is on skill development and habits, when what is required is a developmental approach that enables leaders to deal with increasing levels of mental complexity.
By adapting our way of seeing our world and ourselves in it, we are changing our sense-making capacity and, in so doing, elevating our capacity to meet the demands and challenges of an increasingly complex world, enabling us to come up with new solutions.
Changing behaviour is not enough; it must be joined with a change in how we see the world and ourselves within it. We need a more complex understanding of our current mindset and fears and how they are working against us. To use another metaphor, we do not need to keep adding files and programmes to our existing operating system (new skills, techniques, habits, etc.); we need to upgrade the operating system itself (i.e., upgrade our sense-making capacity and ability to see new perspectives).
So, if you are trying unsuccessfully to make a change despite your own best efforts, or having attended a course, or developed the skills or knowledge, the chances are something else is going on that is an inner barrier to making the change.
Eager to overcome the resistance? Start by taking a deeper look at your immunity to change using this worksheet.
Reach out for an exploratory conversation if you want to partner with me to look beneath the surface of your drives, motives and beliefs to uncover opportunities to overcome the inner barriers in your current way of seeing things.