Immunity to Change
The client doesn’t change, despite commitments
My client came to coaching in some distress. She worked in a high-pressure environment, and carried responsibility for actions that would change her patients’ lives one way or the other – making their lives and health better, or creating damaging impact.
She was highly skilled and experienced, and she had an excellent reputation. She worked very hard, and loved her work, but she wanted to have more discipline in the organisation of her non-clinical time and to work on her habitual pattern of never saying no to invitations to add another patient to the list, speak at another conference or teach another group of students. She was overloaded and exhausted, and her exhaustion was having an impact on her effectiveness and behaviour, which was at times intolerant and verbally aggressive.
Yet the habitual patterns persisted: nothing changed, despite her being desperate to change, and despite what sounded like sincere verbal commitments – to me as coach and to herself – to start being more discriminating about what she said yes to.
What was going on?
Immunity to Change
Coaches and our clients are in the business of change. We all, as coaches, come across clients who express how fervently they really want to change one thing or another (or more) about how they think about, approach or behave in their lives or leadership – and yet don’t engage with the plans and strategies they’ve committed to implement between sessions, or even sabotage them.
Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan originated the theory of Immunity to Change, which can offer both clues to understanding what stands in the way of an individual actually making the change that they seem to rationally and enthusiastically want, and to a process for releasing the obstacles to change. At the heart of this process are the identification of two contributing factors: what Kegan and Lahey term hidden competing commitments and the big assumptions.
‘The gravitational pull of old patterns’
I was privileged to participate in a day with colleagues at consultancy MDV on Immunity to Change, insightfully and sensitively facilitated by Nathan Roberts – a day of profound learning in the context of what Nathan referred to as ‘the gravitational pull of old patterns’, and during which each of us was enabled to work on a challenge of our own.
My experience in that workshop reinforced how significant our somatic experience – our sensations, and our impulses to move – and facilitated movement are for gaining insight and a different kind of understanding from merely cognitive understanding, rationality and reasoning. They can lead to (and again, this was reinforced by my experience and my somatic learning that day) rationality and conscious experimentation, which in turn can lead to change, but meaningful and sustainable personal change doesn’t start from rationality.
The felt experience
The experience I had that day enabled a deep insight through a felt experience, which in turn led to an exploration of my thinking patterns and the beginnings of a change of behaviour which I had been tussling with for years.
An enquiry with the client
Now I’m looking forward to – and curious about – a similar exploration with the client at the head of this piece. How could an enquiry into her immunity to change enable her to achieve the change she so much wants?
