Why is change so hard?

Every year, for as far back as I can remember, I’ve committed myself to new years resolutions. As a workaholic teenager I had just one each year: to stop biting my nails (a stress response that I still fall prey to). As a working mother they ranged from the esoteric (be mindful, start gratitude journaling, become a present mum to my daughters) to the somewhat more banal (wear more colours, develop a skin care regime, get a regular manicure (this one to stop the nail biting temptation!)). 

What they all have in common is that by the end of January I had either broken them or forgotten them - they dissipated into the mist of everyday life, chores, stresses and distractions.

I’ve always struggled to truly change my habits, despite how much I wanted to. I’d always start off strong, the good intentions and motivational podcasts egging me on. I’d religiously go for a run for the first 5 days of the year with the intention to have a healthier lifestyle, a focus on longevity, but then, all of a sudden - and as if from nowhere - a contradictory mantra would overwhelm the progress. The inner voice would creep in: “oh I’ve got a lot of meetings today, I can’t squeeze it in. I’ll go tomorrow”. 

There’s always a tomorrow. 

And so I’d quickly fall back to the old patterns of behaviour,  taking the easier path and putting off the change, justifying this choice via a compelling internal dialogue of why I had to prioritise something else - usually work -  instead (“I need to get that work done, it’s more important than my run, I get paid to do it, I can’t let my stakeholders down” etc). 

Letting business as usual reign, regardless of how much I wanted the change.

It’s been the same for my working life. I’ve known for longer than I care to admit that I wasn’t overly fulfilled by my 9-5 (make it 9-10) structured career. I’d express those sentiments to my girlfriends over an empty wine bottle in an overflowing bar ad nauseum. They’d counsel me to make a change but those precious words fell on deaf ears. I didn’t act on them. 

Playing the victim and living in a state of self-contempt proved easier than the soul searching and risk-taking required of making a true life change. 

I had the choice to change - yet I was unable to. 

This inability to change and the subsequent “ordinary suffering” resulting from not achieving what we really want - despite REALLY wanting it - is extremely common. Indeed I’d argue the majority of us feel it. We cope, rather than live; we resign ourselves to this being out lot. Otherwise, as Mel Robbins - author, motivational speaker, and former lawyer - put it on the Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett (where she talks about change), we’d all be running multi-million dollar businesses. 

As Robbins tells us: “we’re hardwired” to repeat patterns that feel familiar; the familiarity breeding confidence and comfort. Familiarity offers safety.

This perpetuation of the status quo, this trap of sameness is also applicable in working contexts, as organisations struggle to invoke real, sustainable change, be it a reorganisation, a re-brand, a product evolution, a change to growth channels or budget distribution. A huge number of companies struggle to act on the change mindset they’re verbally embracing - no matter how inspiring the speech of the CEO and leadership. They struggle to actualise change in the first place and/or if they do finally get something moving, they struggle to maintain the change. I’ve often seen changes happen only for the team to revert back a few months later (after pining for the “before”), even if the results show that the change was for the best. 

Within companies, there is a two-fold barrier to change - that of individual belief systems combined with the collective mindset. This combination is powerful as it encourages teams to do things the way they’ve always been done, through common attitudes and beliefs that this is the “way it works here.” 

How often have you or your leaders assess talent on whether they are a “culture fit” rather than a “culture add”, because do we really want them to “spoil the broth”? 

How often have you been told you’ve been hired for your experience and new ideas, only to face rejection when you share them or side comments like “ah, they just don’t know how things work here yet”?

Change is tough. 

In 2009, two Harvard psychologists, Dr Lisa Lahey and Dr Robert Kegan, coined the phrase  “immunity to change” in their 2009 book “Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization”. They argue that humans have an innate human aversion to change, resulting from a mix of mental distortions, hidden competing commitments and underlying assumptions. Our mindset or mental systems are actually preventing us from letting the new ideas (that enable us to change behaviour) into our heads. 

Thus in order to really transform we have to take an incredibly deep look at our mindsets - they call it taking a mental x-ray - to uncover how our mental systems are distorting reality. 

They argue that to truly change, we need to understand the underlying causes for why we’re acting in ways that don’t support that change we want (what they call competing commitments) and also what our limiting assumptions underpinning those competing commitments might be. 

Let’s take a workplace example: imagine an employee who expresses a desire to be innovative and to drive new ideas but who, in practice, keeps falling back on tried and tested sales approaches. Why do they stick to the status quo? It could be that they have a competing commitment to be seen as a reliable and consistent performer. Underpinning this might be a deep-rooted fear of failure and assumption that if they try something new, they will fail and lose their job. This ultimately deters them from taking risks and they fall back to what they know. Hence they’ve fulfilled their subconscious goal or competing commitment - to be seen as consistent, to keep a secure job - but they haven’t achieved their expressed goal of being innovative.

As Baek, a contributor to Oxford’s business school, puts it: “It's this tug-of-war between overt intentions and concealed obstacles that renders change initiatives challenging.”

Lahey and Kegan have developed a framework that they use to help uncover these competing commitments and support individuals and organizations in driving real change. They say you need to:

1. Identify a goal
2. List all the behaviours that keep your from your goal
3. List your competing commitments
4. List your big assumptions

To be truly effective you have to go deep and face up to hard truths about yourself and your company. 

But if you can look objectively at the above list and challenge whether those big assumptions are actually still valid (will you really lose your job if you experiment and fail?), this is when you can start to free yourself of the chains, and that’s when change can start to happen.

Because what you break and change are the patterns of thinking that you - or your team - are subconsciously or consciously stuck in. Then you can rebuild them.

But change is a long game. New habits need to be created, new mental patterns need to be built, deep-seated assumptions and group conformity need to be revisited. If we’re looking at a company, a thorough examination of the organisation’s cultural dynamics are needed and trust is required for employees to freely voice their concerns.

Of course sometimes change can happen quickly - when the pain of the current situation gets too big. Robbins calls this the “f*ck it” moment. But this seems rather a painful and traumatic way to go about it to me.

In this nugget I’ve only just scraped the surface of the topic of change and the complexity of the process. There are many models of change and a proliferation of books out there. What I hoped to illustrate is that it’s normal to find change difficult and if you’re unsuccessful at sticking to a change, it doesn’t mean that you’re not motivated enough or disciplined enough. 

It’s much more complex.

Back to my own story, after 18 years in a corporate and secure career I decided to finally hear those words gifted from my girlfriends and make a change in my working life (I branded it the treasure hunt). It means stepping into uncertainty, it means following my inner wisdom and changing the way I make decisions in order to align my actions with it. It means analysing myself and diagnosing a lifetime of ingrained self-beliefs.

And it’s incredibly hard. It would be much easier to revert to the life I lived before. And I’m tempted. 

But the growth is happening, and the change is happening as I continue this exploration. And, regardless of the scale of discomfort, I know through this process I’m expanding. Like a candle, the flame that was dimmed starts to glow again.