A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully.
Desire and motivation are not enough; even when it’s literally a matter of life or death, the ability to really change remains maddeningly elusive.
I don’t know about you, but that finding kills me (no pun intended). And yet, we intuitively know it to be true, right? We have seen it. In others, if not ourselves. Changing our behaviour, even when we are motivated and have all the tools and support (and as we saw in my last blog), is just hard.
That provocative finding was lifted from the flyleaf of the excellent book, Immunity to Change, written by Harvard Graduate School of Education psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Their premise, based on decades of research and practical application, is that when we struggle to change, it’s often because of inner forces and assumptions we’re barely aware of — if at all.
And ironically, that’s because of how well our brain is doing its job.
It’s wired to protect us — to keep fear and anxiety at bay — and in doing so, it shields us from the real source of our stuckness. Our coping strategies work so well that we don’t feel the deeper fears behind our self-sabotage. Which means we’re left confused, frustrated, and spinning our wheels… wondering why nothing’s shifting, even when we really want it to.
We think we really want to make that longed-for change. The change we know would make our lives better. But our brains say “no way!” And we find ourselves procrastinating or even doing the opposite of what we say we want. It’s like driving a car with your foot on the accelerator and the brake…at the same time.
You know the feeling. You have a big project deadline, but suddenly discover that you are scrolling the internet for funny cat videos. You want to make more sales calls, but pre-determine the (negative) outcome in your imagination, so you put them off or say, “why bother?”
While I can’t do the book the justice it deserves in this blog post (and if some of the ideas here resonate, I highly recommend you read it), I want to unpack the main concepts, as I think they can help to at least de-mystify our inability to make those changes we know are in our best interest.
Kegan and Lahey’s process of understanding this for ourselves comes in the form of an immunity x-ray – a four-part structure designed to “get under the hood” of inaction so we can do something about it.
To illustrate how this works, let’s refer back to Alex, the leader I referenced in my last blog.
On the one hand, Alex felt truly committed to being a great servant leader. On the other hand, he was, in fact, acting as a “lone wolf,” especially when things started to fall apart on the project he and his team were working on.
As the project communications faltered and outcomes were increasingly delayed, Alex took over. Working longer and longer hours with increasing travel to the interstate client site to try to repair the relationship and salvage the project, he went from leader to sole operator, sidelining his team.
Weeks of increasingly frantic activity and complete personal neglect caught up to Alex, leading to the demise of the project and a serious physical collapse that, in Alex’s words, almost killed him.
It was only at this point that Alex was able to articulate his hidden competing commitments – those fears and big assumptions that kept his “brake” on as a leader while fueling his unproductive and ultimately self-sabotaging behaviours. Here’s how he filled out his immunity x-ray:
This analysis came easily to Alex, but only in hindsight. Only when it came down to the difference between life and death was he able to face his biggest fear – of being seen as expendable, less valuable, less powerful, less useful.
Equally interesting and valuable was, once Alex bottomed out and confronted his own duplicity, that he was, in essence, the blocker and anti-team enabler (literally the opposite of what he aspired to be as a leader), the changes came quickly. And, in challenging his core assumptions, Alex learned that they were not only false but completely counterproductive.
Here are some tips on how to complete your own immunity x-ray:
Column 1: Your Improvement Goal
- This goal should require adaptation of some kind, not just a technical solution like a training course. If it were that easy to fix, you’d have already done it. Adaptive goals are the ones that require a deeper investigation.
Any specific goal could be technical for one person (the dieter who restricts their eating, loses and keeps the weight off) and adaptive for another (the dieter who has tried every diet, loses the weight, but then puts it back on). Same goal, different mechanisms for change needed.
- It should be personally meaningful. You need to care enough to change.
- Frame it positively: focus on what you want to become or do.
- Make it behavioural so you can tell when you’re actually doing it.
Column 2: What You’re Actually Doing (or Not Doing)
- List all the behaviours that undermine your goal — both actions and inactions.
- Don’t justify, explain, or sugarcoat. Just observe.
- Focus on behaviours, not just states of mind. For example, “I look at my phone” instead of “I get impatient.”
- Include the ones that make you cringe. That’s where the gold is.
- Don’t try to fix them (yet) — that’s a technical response to an adaptive issue still being worked out.
Column 3: Hidden Commitments
- Identify the competing commitments driving those behaviours. These are usually protective — keeping you safe from failure, rejection, or discomfort. Do this literally, starting each statement with, I am committed to…
- Ask yourself: “What fear might be fuelling this?” If it stings, you’re on the right track.
Column 4: Big Assumptions
- These are the deep beliefs behind your hidden commitments — often subconscious, and that feel like absolute truths.
- Start by brainstorming assumptions someone with those commitments might have. Yours will emerge as you reflect.
- These assumptions are what you’ll test and challenge as you work through your immunity map.
For example, Alex’s goal was to be the kind of leader he always wanted to be – by connecting to and empowering his team. That meant owning up to past leadership failures, committing with his team to lead differently, and showing up — consistently — as that servant leader. The real change didn’t come from a new strategy, but from changing the beliefs underneath his old habits.
Does doing all this guarantee success and prevent failure? Nope. Can it increase clarity and potentially decrease the energy waste of the accelerator-brake problem? What do you think?
