Immunity to Change: Post #6--Big Assumptions

Column 4: The Big Assumptions
a. Here we create a tool for adaptive (not merely technical) change.
b. Best way to disrupt the anxiety management or immunity-to-change system is to identify a core assumption that sustains it.
c. We don’t see these assumptions as artificial mental constructs, rather we see them as THE truth…the way the world really is.
d. When we make “big assumptions” they can take us down a destructive path. Like a pilot saying to his co-pilot: “Hey, what’s a mountain goat doing way up here in the cloud bank?!”
e. We have an uncanny ability to filter out countervailing evidence in order to support our own assumptions (ladder of inference)—much to our own peril.
f. What are the BIG assumptions underlying your Column 3 commitments?
g. To identify your big assumptions, try the following criteria:
i. You may absolutely regard the assumption as true.
ii. Each big assumption makes the commitments in Column 3 inevitable.
iii. Unveiling big assumptions opens you up to a much bigger world to explore. Will often lead to “ah-ha” moments.
h. Taking assumptions from being invisible to visible leads to disrupting them and making real change.

Immunity to Change: Post #5--Competing Commitments

Column 3: Hidden Competing Commitments
a. Look at Column 2 items. Imagine doing the opposite and how it might upset you and how you’d feel. What might you not like…or what might you have said “yuck” to?
b. Get to a place that seems unsettling, even dangerous to you.
c. Often people go initially only to a surface level (I am bored or impatient) but not to a deeper, more gut wrenching, raw level (I feel dismissed and irrelevant, or I feel like my kids will screw up).
d. Put the raw feelings/raw material in your “worry box”— a kind of holding tank.
e. Next, generate competing commitments.
i. Competing commitments protect us from our fears and anxieties. They are our commitment to self-protection.
f. Signs of a good third column
i. We become captives of a mental system that protects us…an effective immune system.
ii. Each commitment makes Column 2 behaviors more understandable.
iii. Trying simply to eliminate Column 2 behaviors is fruitless because they serve a powerful purpose—self-protection.
iv. You feel stuck—like moving in two opposite directions.

Immunity to Change: Post #4--Fearless Inventory

Column 2: The Fearless Inventory
a. What are you doing (behavior) or not doing instead that keeps you from getting to your goal?
b. Four criteria for Column 2: 1) Don’t use generalities, rather what specifically do you do that makes you, for example, impatient or a poor listener? People should be able to “observe” what you do; 2) The more items in this column, the better. The deeper the dive, the better the x-ray; 3) Everything in this column should be what works against you to accomplish Column #1, not what you’re doing to overcome it; 4) Don’t tell why you do them (trying to explain or rationalize them) or what you plan to do; just list things working against you.
c. Write down what you’re doing/not doing in Column #2 that prevents you from reaching your goal (in Column #1).