Self-Compassion in Understanding Our Immunity to Change

Not long ago, one of my coaching clients confided that she hoped to banish her internal “saboteurs” forever. Another described his saboteurs as doing everything they could to prevent him from reaching his goal. At the time, this way of speaking made sense to me; I understood it and even identified with it.

In my relationship with my own coach, I had become deeply familiar with my internal saboteurs — the inner voices that piped up with warnings or criticism each time I considered stepping out of my comfort zone. I had given my most vocal inner critic a name, Hetty, and laughed with my coach about buying Hetty a one-way ticket to Hawaii.

Learning to identify those inner critics, or saboteurs, was an essential part of my personal growth. Tuning into the patterns of fear and self-criticism that hold us back can be a useful step toward breaking through them, and supporting my clients in identifying their own saboteurs has been a key element of my coaching practice. Yet, a recent experience unlocked a shift in perspective that I have found immensely helpful for both myself and my coaching.

Last month, I trained with Minds at Work on facilitating their Immunity to Change (ITC) model. The model is designed to help clients understand and address barriers to individual or organizational change. Through a carefully designed sequence of exercises, coaches help clients uncover the “competing commitments” that keep them stuck: the genuine, expressed commitment to making a desired change and the often subconscious, or “hidden,” commitments that work against that change.

I was struck by the ITC model’s positive framing. The underlying ideas are familiar, yet the compassionate language used to describe them is eye-opening. This developmental approach portrays human beings simultaneously striving for both personal growth and personal safety.

Sometimes those pursuits get in each other’s way, as when our specific aspirations for growth conflict with long-held beliefs about how to stay psychologically safe. The commitment to staying safe is not a problem; it is human. But our beliefs about how we must behave in order to stay safe might be outdated. For example, our teenage belief that standing out from the crowd causes social rejection may not hold up as we reach middle age. The ITC coaching approach helps make those deeply held, often unconscious beliefs visible, so we can consider their impact and design ways to test whether they are still relevant and useful.

This way of understanding human change aligns substantially with a familiar framework concerning inner leaders, saboteurs, and limiting beliefs. Yet its more neutral language of “commitments” helped me see something critically important: the word “saboteur” implies negative intent. Accordingly, I had been viewing my own internal saboteurs as bad actors. I regarded them with mild shame, seeing my tendency to self-sabotage as an inner failing that I must overcome. I have heard my clients — like the two I referenced in the opening paragraph — speak similarly. I wondered if, despite my deep commitment to supporting my clients as naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, I was unconsciously projecting similar judgments about their resistance to change.

My exposure to ITC’s language of “competing commitments” opened an essential door to compassion. In this framing, no part of me, nor of my client, is a bad actor or deserves to be banished. As ITC co-creators Kegan and Lahey reassured us during the training, “Your hidden commitments love you! They are trying to protect you!” We can acknowledge them, thank them for their service, and test whether their underlying assumptions about how to stay safe are still true. This is a subtle shift, but an important one. Letting go of judgment opens the door to curiosity, which opens the door to learning. In this way, we continue to grow, revealing new avenues for change that previously were blocked. And we bring a bit more compassion to the challenging work of being human, caring for ourselves and each other as complex, developing beings.

I have made peace with Hetty. Acknowledging her as not just a helper, but one with a developmentally important job to do, makes it easier to examine how her efforts to keep me safe sometimes get in the way of change. And with this subtle shift in framing, I am better equipped to help my clients do the same. Together, we turn judgment into curiosity. At the end of the day, isn’t that what coaching is all about?