October 9, 2025
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Understanding the hidden commitments that sabotage your best intentions and how to overcome them
You know you need to implement more structure as resources have decreased. Your team requires clear processes for prioritization, and they need predictability each week. Your role is to facilitate this discipline, but it's not working.
You know how important it is. You've read the books, created process documents, scheduled your calendar. You understand exactly what needs to happen, yet you can't show up consistently. This creates immense stress, self-doubt, and anxiety.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
The vast majority of people struggle to make meaningful, long-term behavior changes. Research shows that only 1 in 7 people succeed with behavior change, even when their life depends on it. Heart patients who fail to adopt new habits despite the threat of death. Leaders who can't stop micromanaging despite knowing it hurts their teams. Executives who avoid difficult conversations despite understanding the cost.
So what's really going on?
In many cases, the difficulty starts with misidentifying the problem. Challenges fall into two categories: technical and adaptive.
Technical challenges have known solutions. If you follow the steps, you achieve predictable outcomes. Technical doesn't mean simple—the steps can require immense education and skill, like performing an ACL repair. From the example above, creating process docs, blocking calendar time, and writing clear agendas are all technical solutions. If you followed the process consistently, you'd achieve the desired results.
But the struggle to drive consistency? That's an inherently adaptive challenge.
Adaptive challenges are complex, often nebulous problems that require learning, experimentation, and changes in mindset, behaviors, or values to solve. In leadership development, adaptive challenges make up the lion's share of problems, and solving them is the key to unlocking your potential. Things like improving executive presence, delegating more effectively, or strengthening upward communication require changes in often longstanding beliefs and values, and the blockers are unique to each individual.
So how do you approach and overcome an adaptive challenge?
Immunity to Change™ is a powerful framework discovered by Harvard professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Traditional research attributed behavior change failures to lack of motivation or discipline. Kegan and Lahey set out to deeply understand this challenge by examining populations that failed to make changes they genuinely desired, even when consequences were extreme.
They discovered something remarkable: it's not a lack of motivation that leads to failure at committing to new behaviors, but rather a success at upholding other conflicting, often hidden commitments.
Think about that for a moment. You're not failing to change because you're weak or undisciplined. You're succeeding at protecting something you believe is essential to your survival or identity, even if you can't consciously see what that is.
The Immunity to Change framework helps you identify these hidden commitments and use a series of experiments over time to change them. The process involves four layers:
Layer 1: Improvement Goal - What you want to change that's extremely important to you and that you've historically tried and failed to modify.
Layer 2: Doing/Not Doing - The visible things you're either doing or not doing that directly conflict with this goal. Most behavior change strategies stop here, identifying necessary behaviors and expecting you to adjust them over time, often with disappointing results. The ITC process goes deeper.
Layer 3: Competing Commitments - The hidden goals stopping you from making the desired behavior change.
Layer 4: Big Assumptions - What you're assuming about the world that upholds these hidden commitments.
Let's look at an example of a leader who wanted to delegate more effectively.
Improvement Goal: "I am committed to delegating more effectively"
Doing/Not Doing: "I take over for team members when I'm stressed. I don't hand off items when my plate is too full."
Competing Commitments: "I'm committed to ensuring that nothing goes wrong. I'm committed to maintaining my value as a doer in the company."
Big Assumption: "If my team can do everything I do, I won't be needed"
As you can see in this example, the leader knows that delegating more effectively will lead to better outcomes for their team, but their identity and value are tied to being an indispensable doer. Anytime they try to make progress on delegating, they experience a likely subconscious existential threat—the threat that they won't be needed and will lose their job and means of survival.
When you look at behavior change through this framework, it makes perfect sense why it's so challenging. Even positive changes in behavior activate our survival systems in ways that encourage us to return to former behavioral patterns, much like the body's immune system working to maintain homeostasis.
The ability to understand the connection between belief systems and behaviors, and then systematically change both, is valuable for anyone. For leaders, it can mean the difference between success and failure, respect and contempt, or growth and stagnation.
Your unchanged and unaddressed behaviors create ripple effects across your team and organization:
Leaders have multiplier effects, both positive and negative. The patterns you can't break don't just affect you, they shape the entire culture and capability of everyone who depends on your leadership.
Now that you understand the real culprit behind stagnated behaviors, you can start to uncover and impact your own immunity.
Ask yourself: "If I could get better at one thing, the One Big Thing that would make the biggest difference, what would it be?"
This is critical, as the following steps depend on the clarity and importance of this improvement goal. To develop a sufficiently powerful goal, consider:
At the end of this step, you should have a statement like: "I am committed to X"
Example: "I am committed to instituting and following more disciplined processes with my team"
What are you doing or not doing that directly conflicts with your improvement goal? This helps identify competing commitments holding you back.
These should be behaviors, not emotions. To ensure something is a behavior and not an emotion, ask yourself: "If I were to watch a video of the last two weeks looking for examples of behaviors that work against my goal, what moments would I note?"
Don't add explanations or plans to fix them.
Example:
This is arguably the most important step. You'll identify the hidden commitments that keep you in undesired behavior patterns.
Imagine yourself doing THE OPPOSITE of each behavior you listed in Step 2. What fear, dread, or negative emotions come up? The answers to this question illuminate the outcome you're trying to AVOID.
Once you've exhausted the list of fears and worries, phrase them as hidden commitments.
Example:
Worry: If I institute clear processes and discipline, the team will think I'm micromanaging and no longer respect me.
Competing Commitment: I am committed to NEVER coming across as a micromanager.
Now that you've identified competing commitments, the next step is understanding the beliefs that uphold these commitments. Look at what you've written so far and ask: "What must I be assuming that makes these hidden commitments absolutely necessary?"
Example:
You now have a clearer picture of how your behaviors and beliefs are connected, and how they can very strongly resist change. You can start to think of ways to design experiments to test those assumptions.
As an executive coach, I encounter many different immunities in clients, but here are some of the most common:
These leaders struggle to delegate and empower their team's autonomy. Their worries are often related to losing their value to the organization and potentially losing their role.
These leaders know their team needs feedback to grow, and they have feedback to give, but they're conflict averse. They may think that giving constructive feedback will make people not like them, or that engaging in conflict is inherently bad.
These leaders prioritize perfection over progress and feel the need to be involved in every detail of their organization. This leads to disengaged and underutilized teams. Common competing commitments include beliefs that if they aren't involved, the work will be subpar and will make them look incompetent.
These leaders know they need to make tough, unpopular decisions for the benefit of their business, but feel conflicted about how their team will perceive them. Common fears include that if their team doesn't like them, they won't listen to them.
Building awareness about your Immunity to Change is a powerful step toward making meaningful behavioral changes. The work that follows can be challenging and takes time, and often benefits from an outside perspective.
Even having a trusted family member or partner to discuss what you've identified can help you overcome inherent bias or blind spots. Working with an ITC-certified coach greatly increases the likelihood of success and follow-through.
This week, commit to working through Step 1: Identify Your Improvement Goal. Make sure it meets all the criteria, and ask a trusted partner, friend, or colleague to check for blind spots. Even this step can set off a cascade of positive changes.
Ready to go deeper? Book a free ITC consultation here.
Behavior change isn't about willpower or desire. If you've been struggling to change a behavior, you're not broken. Your mind is simply doing an excellent job of upholding the competing commitments that keep you safe.
With the right focus and work, you can overcome your immunity and achieve the transformation you desire. The teams, organizations, and people depending on your leadership deserve your best. That starts with understanding what's really keeping you stuck.
Related Resources:
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
