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Brain Circuits
Is your resistance to change holding you back?
Leaders who do not recognize their own blockers deny themselves the opportunity to think autonomously and self-critically. Consult the following checklist to gauge whether you are internally “blocked” and read on for tips on overcoming your immunity to change.
Checklist
- Do you always need to perform brilliantly?
- Do you find it difficult if you don’t get your own way?
- Do you associate achievement with worth? (“I am what I achieve – if I don’t achieve, I have no worth.”)
- Are there aspects of your life you’d like to change but don’t know how?
How to discover your immunity to change
If you answered ‘yes’ to most of these questions, it sounds like you’re resistant to change – there are areas of your life that you want to change but find yourself incapable of doing it. Discovering the root cause of this immunity to build an improvement pathway takes patience, practice, and in most cases, the supervision of trained professionals, but you can begin by going through the following steps:
1. Define the ‘one big thing’
Start by identifying and fine-tuning the “one big thing” you want to improve. This hinges on finding an improvement goal that hits home. For example, it could be the realization that you’re not emotionally present when you want to be. From this, you might formulate the following goal:
- To be more fully present in the moment and with the people that matter.
2. Create an inventory of saboteurs
This step focuses on our actions (not attitudes) that keep us from our stated “one big thing”. Often, these saboteurs are productivity-related. Examples include:
- Taking on more work, even though your time and your team’s resources are stretched thin.
- The need to respond to all emails at all hours instantly.
- Feeling restless and fretting about work.
3. Identify self-protective strategies
These strategies underpin the unhealthy behaviors we find ourselves unable to change. They serve to shield our ego from harm and are challenging to dismantle. We can work to abstract them, but how we phrase them verbatim can be just as revealing. Examples include:
- I want to be amazing and never have an ordinary moment.
- I want to stay young forever (being constantly productive is a marker of youth).
- I need to win.
4. Crystalize your limiting beliefs
Self-limiting beliefs are informed by things such as our interpersonal relationships and are driven by our need to be seen in a certain way by others (even if this entails other negative consequences). This process is not voluntary, but what is voluntary is noticing your limiting patterns and, in so doing, being granted access to the root cause of your immunity.
Key learning
You cannot think your way past your immunities. Instead, to transition to systems of greater mental complexity, autonomy, and leadership prowess, you have to change your behavior, go against what your habits dictate, and notice what happens to the world around you.
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