Being compassionate to ourselves turns out to be a powerful lever for change

Benjamin P. Taylor
1 min readApr 29, 2021

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Kegan and Laskow Lahey’s #ImmunitytoChange is a beautiful simple practice which goes really deep.

Take a piece of paper with five spaces:

1) commitment to change

A thing you really want to do — lose ten kilos, transform your sales.

A netural, factual description of a change that really implicates you, that you feel in your gut

2) your *actual* behaviours that in fact prevent that goal from being achieved

….a *need* for four square meals a day, being too busy with other admin…

3) if you stopped doing (2), what would you most worry about?

….being deprived of reward/not keeping up with the admin…

4) the competing commitment that justifies and explains (3) — the real reason why it’s *important* to you

…reward for all the work/fear of not being enough

5) big assumption that makes (4) *absolutely necessary*?

…I need and deserve rewards/I’m not enough

It can be surprisingly emotional!

THEN take SMART action, over time — rich and generous and compassionate:

- Safe

- Modest

- Actionable

- Research stance (all about learning)

- Test

…get to the deep roots of why you aren’t achieving your goals, get generous with the *really good* reasons behind it, then gently work at that level.

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