People Just Hate Change, Why?
People hate change, I hate change, we all like to do things our own way.
Change is something that doesn’t come easy, it involves the breaking of people’s habits. Which, as many people know is something very hard to do. Think of New Year’s resolutions, diets, starting a fitness routine. Humans are wired to repeat similar tasks each day, we like consistency and stability, for one eat the same cereal, from the same bowl, in the same portion every day of the week for breakfast and am happy to do it until the end of my days.
Humans have this strange immunity to change, this inability to stray from their own routine. It can be for various reasons, fear, complacency, laziness or many others. It is this resentment to change that led to Kegan and Lahey’s writing their book to help instruct leaders to better manage their employees to help them change to become better employees and team members.
Recently I had the opportunity to trial their technique in a 3-hour workshop, paired with a fellow student we worked together to discover the roadblocks in the way of the pursuit of our own improvement goals, as well as to discuss how this process felt.
I decided to tackle my well-founded habit of procrastination and as such my improvement goal was as follows. I wish to get ahead on tasks when time pressure is not present. I went on to identify what I was doing or not doing that was getting in the way of this goal. From these actions and a deep and honest conversation with my partner, we both were able to discuss what it was that we were worried about if we did the opposite of our current actions.
From my worry of losing friendships and the addition of daily stress, I could formulate what my competing commitment was, the duties that were blocking me from reaching my improvement goal. For me, it was my commitment to friendship and to having a balance between work, university and my social life that was ‘competing’ against my goal.
This led to the final task of the exercise, to identify our big assumption, what I believed that meant I placed these roadblocks, fears and worries which prevented me from achieving my improvement goal. My assumption is that if I become more organised and focus more on my assignments that I would use that aspect of spontaneity that I love in my life.
It is this big assumption that acts as a hidden competing commitment, it drives our decisions and choices and holds us subjected to it. Without acknowledging it through this process or otherwise, it will forever act against any steps towards our own self-improvement, holding us captive to ourselves. Similar to how I felt that my assignments would hold me captive if I was to focus on completing them.
Both my partner and I found similar big assumptions, we both found that the belief that stood in the path of our own self-improvement was that change was going to engulf much of our life and change not just what we were doing wrong in our lives, but it was to effect what we enjoyed. Our own spontaneity and our lack of responsibilities, which was ultimately part of the defining ways we lived our life. However, we also found it refreshing to acknowledge what it was that has stood in our path for so long. We had now become consciously aware of our big assumptions.
As such, I began my path to tackling my improvement goal. I have set myself a challenge to complete my tasks whenever I have time from Monday to Friday when I often have a lot of time in between my classes. So far it has been working, I am more on top of my assignments and have much less stress in my life however, the next challenge will be continuing this in the future when I return to work and come out of lockdown.
Hopefully, this learning process can help you in the future. If you are keen for a more in-depth description of this process you can purchase an e-book here, or for a more synthesised version, you can read this summary by the Harvard Business Review.
