Step Five in Making Change: What are Your Big Assumptions?

This is the fifth of a series of posts detailing the steps you can take to make lasting change using the Immunity to Change model. If you missed them, you can catch them here: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4.

At this point, you’ve figured out what you’re committed to that is keeping you from making your big change. Now, we get to uncover the last piece of this puzzle: what are the big assumptions driving your commitments? There’s a reason why you are committed to not making the change, and now you get to figure out what it is.

Let’s go back to our example. Our One Big Thing is that you want to speak up more in meetings. One of the items on your fearless inventory (what you’re doing or not doing to achieve your One Big Thing) is that you wait until after meetings to email your thoughts, rather than speak up during the meeting. You realize that you do this because you’re committed to not looking stupid in meetings. 

Now you ask: what is the big assumption I have that makes me think I will look stupid if I speak up in meetings? Big assumptions are things that you believe to be true, whether they are or not. They are often so ingrained in us that we don’t see that they are causing this behavior. They may come from something your mother said to you once or a book you read or societal pressures — you don’t necessarily know, but what you do know is that you believe, 100% that this big assumption is true. 

In our example, the big assumption could be that you assume that people who speak up in meetings will be judged by the other attendees if they say anything that’s not precisely correct. Maybe you assume that you have to speak perfectly or else you will be perceived as stupid. 

Is this true? Maybe, maybe not. What we need to do now is, like a scientist, test this assumption, which we will talk about in the next post. But what you have done is completed the Immunity to Change cycle - you’ve stated the change you want to make, what you’re doing/not doing that’s keeping you from making the change, what you’re scared of happening if you make the change, and why you have that fear in the first place. 

This is difficult work, and can feel really challenging. You’re going to be questioning deeply held assumptions. Your brain is resisting this, and continues to resist the change. But by stepping outside of the feeling cycle and looking at this scientifically, you’re undoing the reactive actions of a brain in the stress cycle avoiding change, and turning on those parts of your brain that will help you reason through this. 

You’re now ready for the final step: testing your assumptions.