All behavior makes sense within the narrative it is conducted in.

Have you ever wondered why you do certain things that you know aren’t good for you, but you just keep doing them?

Have you tried to make a change, knowing the benefits, yet somehow find yourself sabotaging your own efforts?

Have you noticed this in a group or organization—sharing a vision but then acting against it?

In the book Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow explore why we are often immune to change.

Even when we have the deepest desire to change, we often don’t.

What they uncover—and what I’ve experienced with many of my clients—is that beneath our attempts to change, there are underlying commitments that work against our efforts.

For example, you might want to lose weight, but at the same time, you have an underlying commitment to comfort and believe that losing weight would require you to give up comfort, so you sabotage your own efforts.

You might want to trust your employees and delegate more, but underneath, there’s the belief that only by maintaining control will you stay relevant (and relevance, in your world, means survival).

You might want to be more open and understanding in discussions, but underneath, there’s a commitment to being right, because the assumption is that only by being right will you matter.

When we reveal these hidden commitments and assumptions, we’re often surprised at how something that once made no sense suddenly becomes crystal clear, even genius.

In working with people, we’ve discovered hidden commitments that made it impossible for them to win, or that limited their success (like the belief they couldn’t be more successful than their father), or they ended up doing things that would ensure they never grew.

Doing the work of uncovering the building blocks of our model of reality is not only revealing—it can literally dissolve behaviors you thought would never change. Once the underlying beliefs and assumptions are seen and acknowledged as such, rather than as truths, they lose their power.

A belief holds the most power when it’s not recognized as a belief. A superstition only has power as long as it’s not seen as a superstition.

So take a moment and reflect:
• What do you want?
• What do you do to prevent it?
• What do you fear will happen if you get what you want?
• What would need to be true for your behavior to make sense?
• Is that really true?