Kick Start Personal Change With One Big Idea – Immunity to Change

Kick-Starting Personal Change Begins With One Big Idea

Most of us consider ourselves a work in progress, on the path towards self-actualisation, with a few related tasks still lingering on our to-do lists. We might dream of being better listeners, more effective at time management, dedicated to self-care, or more adept at delegating. The question so often triggered by such frequently elusive qualities of the self is: why is change so hard?

Harvard professor Lisa Laskow Lahey and psychologist Robert Kegan have dedicated much of their lives’ work to not only answering that very question but pinpointing how each of us can move the personal change needle with greater efficiency. Their work has led them to identify an “immunity to change”, which many of us experience not as resistance to unwanted change, but rather seemingly immovable and invisible roadblocks that stop us from realising the transformation that we truly desire.

While tackling this common foe, Lahey and Kegan introduced the phrase “one-big-thing” into the vocabulary of countless c-suite executives and education professionals around the world, through their book, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organisation, and via courses and professional development programming. These three little words became a buzz term of sorts after the insightful duo identified that unsticking an immunity to change requires a degree of focus and self-analysis not supported by a scatter-shot approach.

Striking Gold With That One Big Thing

It isn’t hard to picture coming away from a professional review with a long list of areas for improvement. Constructive feedback can be immensely valuable, whether we receive it from colleagues, a mentor, loved ones, or even ourselves – but it often leaves us with too many angles from which to mount a simultaneous attack. If we follow the wisdom drawn from Lahey and Kegan’s 30 years spent researching adult human development, a stronger tactic is to either pick one big thing to tackle first, or more powerfully, to identify a single overarching change to aspire toward that would trigger multiple positive impacts at once.

The quality of the goal, the chosen bulls-eye target for change, is critical for achieving a performance-altering or life-altering result. Just as your next-great change-propelling attack can’t be spread too thinly between different aims it also needs to have a target that is strategically optimal. So, how do we identify our personal “one-big-thing” correctly?

To find the most advantageous starting point for a process of change, looking not only inward but also outward is required. As Lahey and Kegan honed their process, they prompted participants to identify a core personal growth goal, asking: “What would be most important for you to get better at, in order to perform any or all of these aspects significantly better?” Next, the participants were encouraged to speak to the people they report to, their peers, those who report to them, and even family members, asking what single thing would make their relevant collaboration better.

This careful exercise of comparative brainstorming proved an effective tool for elucidating a polished change goal that would lead to far more meaningful transformation than something landed on alone.

Uncovering Our Unseen Competing Commitments

In terms of what follows, Lahey and Kegan describe their approach as taking a kind of mental X-ray, a picture of one’s own mindset in regard to the single change envisioned, and it requires teasing apart the immunity to change, layer by layer. They highlight that when we are resistant to a change that we ourselves desire, there are
usually competing commitments lurking in our subconscious, and they, in turn, are dependent on assumptions that may or not be correct. So often, when a person feels stumped by their inability to change, they perceive a personal flaw or a lack of motivation, when in fact they are simply oblivious to unseen but embedded beliefs that are holding them back. Once these are identified, we can begin to challenge and dismantle them.

Fundamentally, in uncovering, probing, and questioning our underlying assumptions, there is a path to self-liberation. By doing the groundwork of identifying a single idea, a change goal that is truly meaningful, and then uncovering the foundations of the obstacle in its way, we can begin the powerful work of repurposing those building blocks and organising them into something new.

Why not get in touch to discover more about the spectrum of coaching services offered by Distinctions Executive & Business Coaching and find out how we can
assist you in navigating the maze of change.