Feeling Constrained by Your Current Mindset? It May Be Time to Take a Ride on The ITC.
“I am feeling constrained by my current mindset!” Who says that to themselves? Probably nobody, but who says “I am not happy with my results?” or “I have a problem and nothing I know is working to solve it!” Statements like these may seem more familiar.
If you are anything like me, and I am betting you are, when you are facing the frustration of not producing a result or are producing one that you wish you were not, it usually takes a while to get to a point where you will consider that the unresolved issue has something to do with you. For me, I am aware that the result is eluding me but if he, she or it would shape up, the issue would rapidly disappear, I just know it!
When I do get around to considering myself as part of the unresolved problem, I can be fairly self-reflective. However, at this point, often the best I am able to do is blame myself and wrestle forward with the now further frustration of knowing the solution lies outside my current field of vision. So maybe I ask for help and maybe it arrives in the form of a trusted friend who can see what I cannot. With the aid of their perspective, I can craft a one-off solution to my problem. I move on from this point with the dread of knowing that, unless I can take my friend with me everywhere, I will likely find myself returning to the cul-de-sac of my own mindset at some future point.
Until now that is!
This past week I participated in a remarkable program developed by a pair of researchers in adult learning, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. Over the past twenty years, this creative pair has developed a process for self reflection and action that is based on the notion that the real reason people don’t change has more to do with what isn’t visible than with what is.
- No doubt, as managers, or maybe even as friends, we have had occasion to witness people struggle with change to a degree that tests reasonableness. As with any situation which defies our imagination or ability to understand, we may have defaulted to telling ourselves unflattering stories about the motives or character of the other party. This would come along of course once we have stopped assuming that it might be we ourselves who are ineffective providers of advice or coaching. But we know better than that!
When you show up for the class to learn to facilitate the (ITC), Immunity to Change Process, you might go in as an experienced coach thinking, “This will be such a benefit to my clients!” Kegan and Lahey have of course seen you coming. Remember, they have been at this for twenty years. While they are no doubt amused by your naïveté, they are gently compassionate (they don’t actually laugh at you … with you, maybe) and allow you to experience for yourself that reading their book and understanding the process they have designed is not the same as participating in this process yourself. OK, so I should have seen this coming but….never mind!
Once through the process with your own revelation in hand, it becomes obvious why Oprah Winfrey picked up on this process and has shared it with her larger audience through her magazine as Step One in her 2011 Feel Good Challenge. (Trust me, the women in your organization or wives of the men you employ read Oprah and share it with their husbands.)
Let me end this little missive by saying that my forty year professional career as both an HR professional and later as a coach-consultant has been a continuous pursuit of methods and practices for taking suffering out of the everyday working experience. I have learned tools, encountered training, acquired skills, developed my own and the like. I believe that the knowledge and insight acquired in working this past week with Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey will become the cornerstone of my practice moving forward and serve as the frame within which all my other learning can now find a home. Like true masters of their craft they made it look easy. As someone who knows better, I thank them for their contribution to working people everywhere.
- What change have you struggled with repeatedly? Maybe it is time to do yourself a favor and take a ride on the ITC.
