Immunity to Change is a powerful tool to help us figure out what is preventing us from making the change we want in our lives, whether it is being more creative, exercising more, or finishing a project. Something is creating the “immunity” that is stopping the change. In this episode, Immunity to Change facilitators Amy Climer and Jen Wilson explain how Immunity to Change works and how to use it. You will walk through creating your own map to lead you to understanding yourself and hear an example of how to use the process. The process helps individuals, teams, and organizations make the changes they want to make.

What You’ll Learn

• How to use the Immunity to Change process to facilitate change in your own life.
• Big assumptions you might be making and how to test them
• How to use the Immunity to Change map to uncover what has been preventing you from changing.

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About Jen Wilson

Jennifer Wilson is a consultant, facilitator and coach. She founded her company, New Leaf Coaching and Consulting LLC, in 2006 with a mission to help people in progressive, mission-driven organizations work well together so they can do amazing work in the world. She has consulted across the U.S. and beyond in diverse settings, from wilderness backcountry to NYC boardrooms, with organizations such as Sierra Club, NRDC, Open Society Foundation, REI, Esperanza Unida, and Wisconsin Public Radio. Jennifer co-founded two urban high schools dedicated to serving marginalized youth.

Jennifer is skilled at deeply listening and synthesizing what she hears into workable ideas that reflect the input of all constituents. Her facilitation style surfaces innovative ideas that challenge current conditions to re-energize organizational culture and the way teams function. Jennifer allows people the space to boldly innovate and stretch, creating opportunities for real change to happen. She helps leaders sustain their resiliency by bringing emotional intelligence and mindfulness practice into the work.

Jennifer has an MA in Counseling and Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis and is trained in coaching, transformational consulting, experiential learning, and outdoor education. She studied Immunity to Change with Dr. Keegan and Dr. Lahey at Harvard University. Outside of work, you can find her wandering around mountains and wilderness with her favorite trail partner (her husband), paddling local waterways, or lost in a really good book.

The Weekly Challenge

Resources

• Jen Wilson’s website
• Book: Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey

Transcript

Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free transcript or read it below. Enjoy!

Transcript for Episode #065: Immunity to Change with Jen Wilson

Amy Climer: Welcome to The Deliberate Creative Podcast Episode 65. In today’s episode, I have Jen Wilson on as a guest. Jen and I are going to do things a little bit different than a typical interview. Jen is a friend of mine and a colleague. We have worked together specifically facilitating workshops on a process called Immunity to Change and both Jen and I have been trained to facilitate this process. It is an incredible tool, essentially, to help you figure out how to make changes in your life, especially when you have tried to do something over and over and you keep getting stuck. If you are hitting that brick wall, the Immunity to Change process may just be what you have been looking for. It helps figure out that we actually have some sort of immunity, something that is preventing us from making a change that we may not even be aware of.

It is one of those tools, one of those processes that I have realized is just incredibly powerful and both Jen and I have used it in our personal lives and with our clients in both individual coaching and with teams. And so we are going to have a conversation and walk you through the Immunity to Change process so that you can use it in your own life. The example that we are using to demonstrate this it is with an individual and we are talking about how to be more physically active in your life. You can use this for almost any change and you can also use it with teams. While we have given the example of the individual, it is also something that you can do together with a group if you are all working towards making the same change together.

The creators of the Immunity to Change process have created a map that helps you walk through. It is a very simple, just a two-page document, and you can get a free Immunity to Change map on the website. If you go to the shownotes, you can go to www.climerconsulting.com/065 and you can download a free Immunity to Change map. You really need that if you are going to try to use this process. So go ahead there, download it. I would suggest using this podcast episode in one or two ways; you can either listen to the whole thing and then sit down quietly and work on your map. The map may take a little while. It is not something that you are going to do in five minutes. It takes a little bit more thought than that. So that is one way you could do it. Or you can use the map as you are listening to the episode. So listen to a portion, hit pause when you need to start working on your map, work on that one section of the map and then hit play again and listen to the next steps. So either way works really well depending on your learning style, but I hope that you will find that the Immunity to Change process is as powerful as I have found it.

On that note, here is Jen Wilson. Jen, welcome to The Deliberate Creative Podcast. Thanks for being on the show today.

Jen Wilson: Thanks for having me. I am really excited to be talking with you.

Amy Climer: Awesome! Can you start by sharing a little bit of your background and tell us who you are and what you do?

Jen Wilson: Sure. I am a facilitator, consultant and coach and I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I feel like I have been really lucky to do a huge variety of things over the past 25 years of my career from being an AODA counselor at an alternative high school to founding a high school for young people coming out of incarceration. But the theme running through everything that I have done is really transformation; helping groups and people grow and become the best that they can be and more than they could imagine, at times. So I like to say that I am on a mission to help people work well together so they can keep their focus on doing amazing work in the world. So all that time and energy that gets wasted in unnecessary conflict and not working as a team could really be channeled into doing the work. And that is what I help organizations do.

I founded my company, New Leaf Coaching and Consulting, in 2006 and now I would say I am primarily working with progressive leaders across movements for social and environmental justice such as Sierra Club and Open Society Foundation and NRDC.

Amy Climer: Very cool. Awesome! Well, I am really excited today because we are going to talk about Immunity to Change, which both of us have experience in and are both facilitators in this process and I know we both agree that it is really powerful. To start off, can you explain, what is Immunity to Change?

What is Immunity to Change? [05:10]

Jen Wilson: Immunity to Change was developed by doctors Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey and they are at Harvard University. And the way Bob tells it is that he really got into this work and got curious about it when he was helping a client figure out why medical patients were, at astounding rates, very non-compliant with their treatment. So basically, even the face of life-threatening illness, people still were not making the changes or following what they needed to do to save their lives. The compliance rate was something like one out of seven people made changes. And so, did these other six people want to die? No. Not at all. So he realized something else was going on and then he did so much investigation and brought Lisa Lahey into the work and they came up with what they call the Immunity to Change Mechanism.

Basically, when we don’t make changes that we actually really strongly desire for ourselves, we usually do one of two things; we blame ourselves and think of ourselves as lazy or we say, “Oh, I just don’t have the willpower,” or, “I’m not disciplined,” or we blame something outside of ourselves like saying I do not have time or if only I had better running shoes or a better teacher for my class. So neither of those things is very helpful because they are both rather disempowering and even discouraging to do to ourselves.

So Immunity to Change reveals that there are actually some understandable and even intelligent, if faulty, reasons where we unwittingly resist the very changes that we say we want. So the Immunity to Change process actually helps us uncover and challenge those internal contradictions that kind of feel like having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, so both are going and you are not really getting anywhere. So we can really see what is going on instead of just blaming ourselves or our circumstances for staying stuck where we are.

Amy Climer: That is a great description. I just think of your example about the medical patients where okay, you just found out you have this serious heart condition and if you do not stop eating huge hamburgers three days a week, your heart is going to stop beating, and people still keep eating the hamburgers. And so Immunity to Change helps illuminate like okay, what else is going on?

Jen Wilson: Yeah. Because usually what somebody will say is, “I just don’t have the willpower.” And it is not that. There is so much more to it and that is where Immunity to Change picks up where most self-helps kind of stops off. So traditional self-help would say identify your goal, write it down and then just do it, and this gets under why we cannot just do that.

Amy Climer: How did you first learn about Immunity to Change?

Jen Wilson: Several years ago, I was really looking for some advanced training that would kind of take my work to the next level and add a lot more value to the work I do with my consulting clients. So I asked lots of colleagues all across the country what is the single best training you have had or have been to over the past five years. One of my friends at Goshen College said, “Hands down, knowing you, you would like Immunity to Change. You really need to go and learn about this.” And I did my own research about it and then the more I learned about it, I got really intrigued so I signed up to go out to Harvard and learn with Bob and Lisa directly. How about you? How did you learn about it?

Amy Climer: I was in a PhD program for Leadership and Change at Antioch. And because the program was, in part, focused on change, we were assigned the book, Immunity to Change by doctors Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey, whom you mentioned. So I am reading this book and I was about a third of the way through the book and I just recognized how powerful this tool was. I immediately started searching online for like how can I learn more about this. I felt like I wanted to go beyond what I was just learning in the book. And I ended up working with one of my professors to bring in two of the Immunity to Change coaches to our program and they worked with about 20 of us and did the same training that you all did. Those coaches were Richard McGuigan and Nancy Popp. Anyway, it was amazing training and I know both of us agree this is just a fascinating, really powerful process to help us figure out okay, how do we get past these things that we get stuck in?

Jen Wilson: Yeah. Probably like your training, we actually got to make our own maps before we learned about how to lead others through it and I was going through the process thinking I know myself pretty well, what am I going to really learn that is really new? And then there was this moment where I just thought, “Whoa, I didn’t see that coming.” And that is what I think is powerful. What experience did you have?

Amy Climer: Oh my gosh, it was the exact same. Where, again, I feel like I am fairly reflective, I know myself well and then I started going through the map, it is like, okay, just like a punch in the gut. And not in a bad way, more just like, “Oh my gosh!” And it totally made sense. It was so illuminating and it has helped me make some changes in my life for sure.

Jen Wilson: Yeah, I can say the same.

How does Immunity to Change Work? [10:33]

Amy Climer: Let’s start with an overview of the Immunity to Change process. Can you give us a big picture explanation for how does this work and what is it? Let’s go more depth.

Jen Wilson: Starting, we will kind of do the 3,000 foot view and then we will get more into detail with things. It really starts with selecting an improvement goal for yourself and a commitment to something that you know if I did this, then my life and myself would be substantially better. So if you think about people who know you well and care about you, if you ask them, “Hey, is this a change you think would help me,” and they all say, “Oh yes,” then you know you are on toward the right goal.

So then once we have that, really selecting the right one is the most important part, and we will talk more about that. Then you do what is called an Immunity to Change Map and you go column by column to examine your own behavior’s underlying beliefs. That kind of reveal the immunity, the resistance to the very changes that we say we want to make. And by the end of the process, you kind of have some things revealed, like we were just talking about like whoa, you have that moment, and then you take away really actionable steps or what we call experiments that will begin to release ourselves from the cycle of both wanting change and not changing the very things that we say we want to change.

Amy Climer: Nice. We are going to walk through a fictitious example of how someone might use the Immunity to Change map. For those of you who are listening, I mentioned this earlier at the beginning of the episode, but you might want to download the map. There is a free map on the shownotes, which is www.climerconsulting.com/065, and you can download that. And if you want, you can kind of listen to us talk about each section of the map then you can hit pause and work through it on your own and then start up the podcast again. Or you can listen to the big overview and then work on it on your own. So we are going to walk through a fictitious example. Jen, can you explain the person and the situation we are going to walk through?

Jen Wilson: Absolutely. We decided to use this as an example; somebody who knows that going to yoga would be beneficial but is not. So we will call her Sherry. So Sherry has been told by some experts in her life; her physician, her therapist and friends that actually yoga would help solve some physical and emotional challenges that she has been having. Sherry has a high pressure, fast-paced job that keeps her at her desk or in meetings all day long and not very physically active and then she finds she has trouble relaxing or winding down at night and therefore sleeping. So she knows yoga would really help her with her physical wellbeing and also help her feel more calm and mindful and peaceful, which are all things that she very much wants. However, every Monday, even though she has actually paid for a class already, she keeps finding that she avoids it and just is not going. So that is our fictitious scenario that we will be working with. The fictitious Sherry.

Amy Climer: Awesome.

How to Use the Immunity to Change Map:

Column One [13:30]

Jen Wilson: Amy, do you want to go ahead and explain column one and how we would even get started?

Amy Climer: Yeah. In this map, there are four main columns that we are working with. The first column is column one, which is where you write down what are you committed to, what is your improvement goal. There are some criteria that the goal has to meet. First of all, the goal has to be true for you, meaning, it has to be about you. So it cannot be something like, “Oh, I really wish like my boss would do this or my sister would do this.” No, it has to be you and therefore implicate you. There needs to be room for improvement, that one is probably obvious. And it needs to be significantly related to your work and your life and it feels really important. So if you think of like on a scale of one to five, one being completely unimportant, five being incredibly important, this goal should fall on a four or five. You basically answer the statement; I am committed to…

So in our example with Sherry, she might say, “I am committed to attend yoga class every Monday night.” That is it. That is column one. It is pretty simple. Jen mentioned a moment ago that it could help you to like talk to some other people if you are sure like what should I focus on? Get some input from others, but at the end, you have to make that decision for yourself; what is really important to you. So it just a simple; I am committed to (blank). So that is column one. Jen, do you want to talk about column two, like what is next?

Column Two [15:10]

Jen Wilson: Yeah. In our example, being Sherry, so Sherry’s commitment and goal is to get to that yoga class that she has paid for on a regular basis on Mondays, so column two is called Doing and Not Doing.  This is not a column that is about why you are not doing something or what you should be doing about it. So it is not about solutions or whys, it is really about being really honest, coming clean about the things that you do, the behaviors that you have that actually work directly against your goal in column one.

For our example here, we would ask Sherry what are you doing and not doing to actively work against getting to class? Some examples might be; I feel the pressure of work assignments and stay late to work on those so I work late. I schedule appointments at the same time as my class. Or I forget my yoga clothes at home and do not have time to go get them after work. Or I eat a huge afternoon snack and do not feel well or like going to class. You can see that these are not things that Sherry is thinking, but things she is actually doing or not doing, that directly get in the way of going to class. That one can sometimes be a little tricky because people are often tempted to start making excuses in this column and this is not the column for excuses. It is simply describing what I do, like, “Yup, this is what I do,” and just laying it out there, kind of coming clean.

Amy Climer: And they are not always bad things, right?

Jen Wilson: Exactly.

Amy Climer: Some of those things that you are doing, instead, might actually be really good positive things, but they are still getting in the way of going to yoga class on Monday night.

Jen Wilson: I actually know a real person who on the way to yoga class thinks of ten things and reasons why she should not be going to class while she is actually driving there and then turns the car around and does something else. And doing good things like oh, I need to go get my mail or I need to go — whatever it may be — meet with a friend who is in distress. So it can be good things, as you said, but they work actively against the goal in column one. So that is column two, and then we move into column three and, Amy, would you like to explain that one?

Column Three [17:30]

Amy Climer: I would say, for the most part, column one and column two are pretty straightforward, a little bit easier for most people, and then column three and four is where it starts to get a little bit harder. Column three is actually broken up into two sections and you are figuring out what else is going on that you have what is called your hidden competing commitment. This means that those things that you are doing instead of going to yoga, what is the commitment to those things? There are some criteria that these commitments follow. One is that they are usually coming from a place of fear. They are also coming from a place of self-protection, like I am doing this so that I do not have this other bad thing happen to me. And they help explain the why of column two; so why are you doing these things instead? So these competing commitments help explain that. And they feel powerful.

Column three starts off with what is called the Worry Box, where you write out here are all these worries of these things of why I am doing these other things instead of column one. For instance, for Sherry, her Worry Box might say I’ll look stupid in yoga class, or people will laugh at me and silently be judging me, or I’ll feel weak and uncoordinated, or I’ll feel like a failure and someone who doesn’t deserve to be in this class, or my anxiety won’t go away no matter what I do, so why should I go to yoga class, or I am not skinny and people will be judging my size in the middle of the class. These are some worries that Sherry might have that prevent her from getting to yoga class.

The other part of column three is that there is the commitment. You might ask the statement; I may also be committed to (blank). So in column one you are answering the statement I am committed to, but column three is saying like, “Oh and I might also be committed to (blank).” So in the case of Sherry, she might respond by saying, “I’m committed to not looking stupid. I’m committed to not having people laugh at me and judge me. I’m committed to not believing that I’m a weak person or I’m committed to feeling like I’m a strong person. I’m committed to not feeling like I don’t belong. And I’m committed to not discovering that my anxiety is permanent and beyond my control.” I feel like when I started doing column three, it just was like, “This is getting a little harder. This is getting a little deeper, more emotional.” Did you find that same experience, Jen?

Jen Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. And this is that moment when I was going through my own map where I thought, “Wow, I’m still dealing with some of these things that I thought I’d kind of dealt with and there they are.” And I think that is why I like to call this column a compassion column because it is hard to be this self-honest and still hold compassion for ourselves, and that is really the goal here. So it is not to beat up on ourselves, but to very compassionately, yet honestly, really see what is in our gut, what’s in our heart underneath these things.

Amy Climer: I feel like a lot of the things that come out in the Worry Box when you are mentioning these worries, for me, anyway, I found they were not things that I was going to nonchalantly talk to my friends about like, “Oh yeah, I’m kind of worried about looking stupid in yoga class and that’s why I don’t go.” They tend to be like so much deeper that I almost do not even notice they are there.

Jen Wilson: That is why they are called hidden commitments. They are not the usual things we are looking to as to why we are not doing the behavior we say we want or things we chat about over coffee with our friends, like you said.

Amy Climer: That is column three, we start peeling back the layers and looking and at this hidden commitment. The next step is column four. Can you explain that one, Jen?

Column Four [22:04]

Jen Wilson: This is the moment where Bob, one of the developers of Immunity to Change, likes to say, “Behold, the Immunity to Change.” Because this is where it is like you get to see, when you are writing on your map, you can see if I actually have these worries and fears and commitments, then my behaviors in column two, the doing/not doing, they make sense. So if I am committed to not looking stupid, it makes sense that I avoid my yoga class. If I am committed to not having people laugh at me and judge me for my size, it makes sense why I might choose to work late and not go to yoga class. This is where we can see that wow, okay, this is what is really going on. It is not that I lack willpower or I am just not a disciplined person, I am really committed to protecting myself. So the thing that we want to realize in column four, it is called Big Assumptions, is that the assumptions that we are making that go along with these fears and commitments restrict our world and they may be faulty and not really true. So that is what we are investigating in column four, the big assumptions.

Let’s take one of the hidden commitments, for example, I am committed to not having people laugh at me and judge me. Some assumptions Sherry might have behind that commitment there would be I assume people will be mean-spirited or I assume other people in the class will all be skinny and experts at yoga. I assume people will think less of me if I cannot do it perfectly. And I assume people are paying attention to me and what I am doing on my mat. That is where we kind of look at what are the big assumptions we are making behind our fears and worries?

Let’s take one there, so the assumption I assume that if people laugh at me, what is really going on? So you want to take the sentence and say I assume that if — and then you take one of the assumptions — if people laugh at me, then… And the then is what we call a BTB, a Big Time Bad consequence. That it is dire and when taken as true, it means really bad things for us. So I assume that if people laugh at me then I will hate myself, is something Sherry might say here. And that is a dire consequence, one we want to avoid. And when taken as true, it really keeps this whole system anchored and really deeply in place, and that is why we say stop.

So here, in column four, we have the opportunity to begin to kind of pry at that. We ask ourselves questions like was that true? And that seems like a simple question, but it is actually a pretty profound one. And then variations of that are; is it always true or can it be degrees of true? It is true sometimes, how true is it? And we can begin to loosen up around this assumption and find our way out of it into a more expanded world where we have more freedom and where we are more liberated than the constricted world that these fears keep us in. So that is the idea there. Amy, anything that you want to add about assumptions in this column here?

Amy Climer: I guess, one thing I was thinking about really with all four columns together is that two people could have the exact same thing in column one, like I want to get to yoga class once a week, yet as they walk through columns two, three and four, they have completely different hidden competing commitments and completely different assumptions. I just say that because you might be listening thinking, “Well, I also struggle with yoga but I’m also not worried about anyone making fun of me, that’s not my issue so this doesn’t work for me,” but it could be very different for every single person.

Jen Wilson: Absolutely. And to bring that back to the main theme of your podcast, of creativity, you might be a person where you might be avoiding working on your book or going back to your studio and working on a painting and a map would be a perfectly wonderful thing to do to kind of get out of that feeling stuck place with your creative endeavors, however you define creativity or whatever your endeavor might be, to look at why that is happening. Of course, you want to be creative and work on your creative work, but I am not. So your map, as Amy said, is going to just be really personal to you because our worries and fears are really unique.

At the same time, I would add that often, what gets in that worry box is very personal yet highly universal. Most of us have fears and worries that have some elements of universalism such as we want to feel good, we want to be respected, we want to belong. So it can tap into some pretty universal fears, even though what we think and feel is very specific and personal to us.

Amy Climer: Yeah, I think that is a great point. Very true. So we have developed this big assumption that if people laugh at me I am going to hate myself. Then what? What do we do next with that?

How to Test the Big Assumptions You Might Be Making [27:23]

Jen Wilson: Nobody wants to end the map there and just be like, “Oh, okay.”

Amy Climer: “Well, that was helpful.”

Jen Wilson: The whole idea is to begin to leverage change because just examining this is only one part. The second part is taking action and beginning to free ourselves. So we start to do what is called experiments. And these should be small and measured and not too scary. We do not want to go for broke here and throw ourselves in the deep end and risk the worst consequences if we find out the answer to our experiment is yes, something bad is going to happen. So they should be small and doable and begin to test out this reality.

So in Sherry’s case, if her assumption is that she is going to be laughed at, then an experiment could be something like talking to her friends who go to yoga class and say, “Have you ever been in a yoga class where either you or someone else was laughed at in class?” And that is a way to, very safely, test out this idea that that can happen. And the answer will come back as it does and again you can answer those questions; is it true, is it always true? Is it just a little bit true? And so that begins to free ourselves from this assumption.

Another experiment might be I am going to go to one class and just observe, is anyone laughing at anyone, and just see and observe. That is an experiment that can start helping us reveal that we might be holding a really faulty assumption, which is that people will laugh at me in yoga. Having that assumption guarantees that we are going to stay in this place of avoiding it, but if we see it is not true, then we are free to actually go to yoga in a much freer way and place and be free from that fear.

Amy Climer: I think that one thing to point out is that when we look at those big assumptions and then we start doing those experiments, the experiments are designed to help us figure out is the assumption true or not. But then if you start thinking back historically in your life, there was probably a point where that assumption was true and it could have been 20, 30, 40 years ago, and we have kind of held onto that and now we are in a completely different place and the assumption is no longer true. For instance, for this individual, there may have been a situation in grade school or high school or something where she was doing something physical and she did get laughed at. And so that may have happened to her and so Sherry is feeling like, “Oh, I don’t want to ever have that experience again.” And it could even be something that she has completely forgotten about.

Jen Wilson: Yeah, really good point. I totally have an example like that. I remember very clearly sitting cross-legged in a circle in music class in third grade and we were going around and the teacher is having a sing one note, and I sung my note and everyone laughed and it is as vivid as yesterday. I do not think about it often, but I also think it is why I do not get up and do karaoke and maybe I could.

Amy Climer: Yeah, exactly. Who knows? Maybe there is an amazing hidden voice in there.

Jen Wilson: And that is the idea of having that restricted world, so how our world can be smaller when our fears have us versus us consciously addressing our fears.

Amy Climer: One thing I wanted to throw out as kind of a — I guess I would say like as a mistake or an error. I do not know, that seems like a big word, but something that maybe people might struggle with when they are working on their Immunity to Change map is when they get to this point, they figure out their big assumption and then they go to do an experiment and they go into this really high risk experiment. Like the examples that you shared, Jen, were like these really easy safe things like I am just going to ask a couple of really close friends if they have ever been laughed at at yoga or if they have even seen anyone be laughed at. That is pretty low risk versus going to an advanced yoga class and participating and seeing what happens or seeing if you get laughed at. That is a bigger risk. And so I think the point here with these experiments is that you are just going really small and taking these little baby steps to see what happens.

Jen Wilson: Right, you do not want to overwhelm yourself. For example, let’s say that maybe your goal was to ask for a raise from your boss. Your experiment would not be to storm in Monday morning and say, “I want a raise or I’m out of here,” we are not recommending that.

Amy Climer: Yeah. And so kind of figuring out okay, what might be the first step that you would to experiment, to get comfortable to make that reach. And it might be asking people, “Hey, have you ever asked for a raise successfully and how did it go? Or unsuccessfully, what did you do?” And so you start like just doing some research and figuring out okay, what might my approach be and maybe the next step is practice with somebody. So there are all these little things you can do to start addressing and hopefully changing that assumption that you have.

Jen Wilson: Absolutely. And I think, too, when thinking about okay, I want to make a map for myself, I want to try this out, so a few suggestions would be to work with a partner and work from the materials that are available from Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Minds at Work site or the Immunity to Change, Amy is going to include resources in the shownotes that you will see with this podcast. It can be really helpful to work with someone else because often times, having somebody ask us questions and have somebody to talk out loud to helps us see things or reflect in a way that it is hard to do just in our own heads. I do have one friend where she is just really good at that and she has worked through her own maps by herself. But having somebody who is either trained in the process or a close-trusted friend, someone who cares about your wellbeing, working through this together can be really powerful.

The Weekly Challenge [33:30]

Amy Climer: Yeah and that is a great segue into the weekly challenge, which you probably have guessed. Your challenge this week is to walk through your Immunity to Change map. If you go to the shownotes, you can download a free map that is just a quick two page, is very simple, you can download the Immunity to Change map. And then you might even want to re-listen to this episode for the directions or like Jen said, you might want to consider working with a coach. Both Jen and I are Immunity to Change coaches and facilitators.  Bob and Lisa have a great book which, I mentioned before, that is how I even found out about this. Their book is called Immunity to Change. I will put that in there. But the challenge is to work through this map this week and feel free to add any comments or questions in the shownotes and I will be sure to respond to do you.

I will give one, I guess, just like a caution and this is just from my own experience, is one of the things that can happen when you are working with somebody else on the map is — and it is great when you are each working on your map, that can be kind of a nice combination, but one of the things you want to be sure to avoid is that when you are working through it, and so you both have your column one and then you both have your column two and you are sharing your column two, and especially as you get into column two, three and four, there can be a tendency for the person you are working with you start giving you advice and start telling you how to stop feeling that way or how to get to yoga class every week. That is not helpful. That is not going to help you reach your big assumption. It is not going to help you make change.

I have been in that situation where I was paired with somebody and they started giving me advice and help me figure out how to solve my problem and it was so frustrating. It made me just want to shut down and walk away. So be careful that, (1), you are not doing that to someone else, but then, (2), that you are paired with somebody who will be more of a listener and a paraphraser rather than throwing advice at you.

Jen Wilson: That is excellent to point out, Amy. And often times, that advice giving comes from a good place. I work a lot with educators and large groups and I say, “So when someone has a problem, you want to…?” And they all yell, “Fix it.” Because we want to be helpful, but as Amy points out, the most helpful thing to be is to simply ask questions and listen well and help someone focus on their own work versus trying to solve anything for them.

Amy Climer: Yeah, absolutely. Jen, this was really great. I loved having this conversation and this is just a little bit different format for the podcast so thank you so much for being here.

Jen Wilson: Oh, it has been my pleasure. I love talking about this with you in particular.

Amy Climer: Great. If people want to reach out to you, if they want to hire you as a coach or they want to learn more about you and your work, where can they go?

Jen Wilson: My website is http://consultnewleaf.com/ and you can also find me on LinkedIn, Jennifer Wilson, http://consultnewleaf.com/ is my website for information.

Amy Climer: Great. And I will put all of that in the shownotes so it will be really easy for everyone to find. Thank you again, Jen, for being on the show. This is really fun.

Jen Wilson: Thank you Amy for hosting. I have enjoyed my time here with you.

Amy Climer: Thank you Jen Wilson for being on The Deliberate Creative Podcast. It was great to have you here. I really enjoyed that episode and doing things a little bit different where Jen and I were going back and forth and sharing things with you, versus the traditional interview. So I hope that you found that helpful and I cannot say enough, I really encourage you to download the Immunity to Change map and to work through it.

If you want more depth, there are a couple of ways you can do that; one, you can purchase the book, Immunity to Change, and I will put a link to that in the shownotes. It is an excellent book. You heard me talk about the book in the episode. I highly recommend the book. And if you also want more in-depth coaching on the Immunity to Change process, it is something that both Jen and I do and so you can reach out to either of us if you are interested in that and we can work with individuals or with teams. But I definitely encourage you to give it a shot. It is really cool. It is a really powerful process.

I want to just say thank you so much for listening to The Deliberate Creative podcast. If you have enjoyed this show, please head over to iTunes and leave a review. It just takes a few minutes. If you want a shortcut to get there, you can go to www.climerconsulting.com/itunes. While you are there, you can also subscribe to the podcast. New episodes come out every other week. On the alternate weeks, I write a blog post which you can also find at www.climerconsulting.com. The shownotes for this episode are at www.climerconsulting.com/065 because this is Episode 65. On the website, you will find all the past episodes and there are also easy links for you to share these with your friends and colleagues via social media or email. So if this was helpful for you, I would definitely encourage you to share it, spread the love, get this out there.

Y’all, I hope you have a wonderful week that is filled with working on your Immunity to Change map and further new insights in your life. Talk to you next time, bye.

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