By Suzana Grieme | StandOutJane
You are good at your job. Genuinely good. You deliver, you’re reliable, you’re the person your team and your partners trust with the hard stuff — and you have built a reputation on being exactly that kind of person.
You also have a list. A private one, that you’ve been carrying longer than you’d like to admit.
On it:
Speak up more directly in leadership meetings instead of softening every opinion before it leaves your mouth. Stop taking work back from your team when you could just let them handle it. Set a real limit on your evenings instead of answering emails at 10pm. Get back to taking care of yourself — exercise, lunch, sleep — before you hit the wall again.
You set these goals with a serious intention. You meant them, every time. But every time, something pulls you back.
You call it a discipline problem. You call it a confidence problem. You call it a prioritisation problem. Maybe all three.
But I want to offer you a different explanation — one that I think will change everything about how you see this.
The problem is not your commitment. It is your competing commitment.
In 2009, developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey published research that reframed how we think about change in adults. Their work, laid out in Immunity to Change, showed something that goes against almost everything we have been told about personal development.
Most people, they argued, do not fail to change because they lack willpower, discipline, or desire. They fail because they are simultaneously committed to two contradictory things — and the hidden commitment is just as real, just as strong, and just as deeply held as the stated one.
They called it an immunity to change.
Think of it like a biological immune system. The immune system’s job is to protect the organism from threat. It does not distinguish between a genuine danger and something that merely looks like one. It responds to perceived threat — and it responds effectively, every time.
We each have a psychological immune system that works the same way. When we set a goal that threatens something we are unconsciously protecting — our image, our sense of safety, our place in the room — the immune system activates. It does not announce itself. It simply produces a very convincing set of reasons why now is not the right time, why this situation is different, why we probably should not rock the boat after all.
The result looks like procrastination. It looks like self-sabotage. It looks like being bad at follow-through.
It is none of those things. It is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The four-column map
Kegan and Lahey developed a diagnostic tool for surfacing this immune system — what they call the four-column map. I use a version of this with every client I work with, and I want to walk you through it, because I think you will find yourself somewhere in here.
Column one is your improvement goal — the thing you say you want to change. Stated in positive terms. Not “stop micromanaging” but “trust my team to deliver without me.” Not “say no more” but “protect my time and energy for the work that matters most.”
Column two is what you are doing instead — the behaviours that are actively working against that goal. Taking the work back when someone struggles. Softening every opinion before it leaves your mouth. Saying yes before you have even thought it through.
Column three is where it gets interesting. This is the competing commitment — the hidden goal that makes the behaviours in column two completely rational. The way to find it is to ask: what would feel genuinely frightening about stopping that behaviour? What are you protecting?
For most of the ambitious professional women I work with, column three looks something like this:
I also need to be seen as indispensable. I also need to not be seen as difficult. I also need to prove I can handle this without help. I also need people to know that I care.
These are not weaknesses. They are behaviours that makes sense to you. The problem is that they are directly at war with column one. You cannot fully delegate and also ensure everything is done to your standard. You cannot speak your opinion and also never risk being seen as too much. You cannot stop performing and also maintain a certain kind of image.
Column four is the big assumption — the belief that makes the competing commitment feel not just rational, but necessary. This is usually where the work gets introspective and careful (in a coaching conversation), because the assumption tends to feel completely, obviously true.
If I step back, people will realise I am not as capable as they think.
If I am too direct, I will be seen as aggressive — and aggressive women aren’t acceptable.
If I ask for help, I am admitting I cannot manage this on my own.
If I slow down, everything will fall apart.
These beliefs are not character flaws either. They are conclusions. They were reached at some point — often early in a career, often based on real experience, often in environments where the belief was actually correct. The problem is that we carry them forward long after we should have moved on. Long after we are in rooms where the rules have changed, where the conclusions no longer apply, where we are operating from a set of rules that no longer exists.
The hidden tax
I want to be specific about what this can cost you, because I think we are used to making it vague.
It costs you decisions you never make. The pitch you don’t put forward because the last one didn’t land. The role you don’t apply for because you’re not sure you’re ready — and you’ve been not-sure-you’re-ready for three years now. The conversation you don’t have because the relationship feels too important to risk.
It costs you recovery time. Every time a setback confirms the belief in column four — every time something goes wrong and your immune system says “see, I told you so” — the belief gets stronger, not weaker. The setback is no longer just a setback. It becomes evidence. And evidence is much harder to argue with than a fear. This is how the immune system compounds over time: it doesn’t just stop you from changing, it makes every failure feel like proof that you were right not to try.
It costs you energy. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying two contradictory commitments at once. You are working toward the goal and working against it simultaneously. It’s like you’re pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.
And, it costs you progress. The most consistent thing I notice in ambitious women who have been operating with an invisible immune system for years is that they have quietly narrowed themselves. They have become very good at a carefully curated version of themselves — the version that does not trigger the fears in column three. They are still achieving. But within a narrower and narrower version of themselves.
This is not a discipline problem – so the solution is not more discipline.
This is the part that matters most, and I want to say it plainly.
If the reason you keep breaking promises to yourself is a competing commitment driven by a deep assumption — then trying harder is not the answer. A stricter morning routine is not the answer. A better productivity system is not the answer. More accountability is not the answer.
The answer is to make the immune system visible. Because an immune system you can see is an immune system you can choose to work with, rather than one that is simply running your decisions without your awareness.
The shift that Kegan and Lahey describe — and that I see happen in coaching — is not dramatic. It does not require a personality change or a complete reinvention. It requires something more specific: a change in the big assumption. Not fighting it. Not forcing yourself to act against it while it is still fully operational. But testing it. Designing small, safe experiments that let you find out whether the assumption is actually, currently, factually true.
Most of the time, the evidence surprises people.
The team does not fall apart when you step back. Your partners don’t lose confidence in you when disagree with them. The room does not shift against you when you say what you actually think. The fear was real. The conclusion it produced was not inevitable.
What you can do for yourself, right now
If you’ve read this far, you probably recognise some part of yourself in it. So here is something practical you can do right now.
Take ten minutes. Find a piece of paper. Draw four columns.
In the first column, write the change you keep not making — the one that has been on the private list the longest. Example: “I want to speak with more authority and stop softening every opinion before it leaves my mouth.”
In the second column, write what you actually do instead. Be honest. No one is watching. Example: “I over-explain. I wait until I feel ready. I apologise before I’ve even said the thing.”
In the third column, finish this sentence: I also need to… — and write down what comes up. This is the commitment that makes column two completely rational. What are you protecting? Example: “I also need to be liked. I also need to be seen as collaborative, not difficult. I also need to feel safe in that room.”
In the fourth column, follow it all the way to the end. Because if I don’t… then… What is the belief underneath the protection? What does your inner voice say would happen? Example: “If I speak up directly, people will think I’m too much. I’ll be seen as arrogant, or wrong, and I’ll lose the credibility I’ve worked so hard to build.”
Then read it back.
That is the most accurate map of what is actually in your way — more honest than any goal list, more useful than any productivity framework. And from here, the question is no longer: how do I try harder? It is: is this assumption actually true?
There is only one way to find out.
Test it. Design small, safe experiments that let you find out whether the assumption is actually, currently, factually true.
You are not failing. You are running a system that was built to keep you safe — and it is working exactly as designed. The question is whether it is still keeping you safe from something real, or whether it is keeping you from something you’ve already earned.
Image: Alamy, Demi Moore, Margin Call.