What Is Minds At Work ™
Overview of Our Approach
The immunity-to-change® approach helps people accomplish sought-after behavioral goals by making visible to them previously unrecognized "parallel goals" ("counter commitments") which are producing precisely the behaviors that undermine their aspirations.
For example, a person may very much want to stay on his anti-cholesterol medication. If we interviewed him, he might well be able to say what the drug does for him, why that is important to him, that he wants very much to comply with his doctor's prescription, and that he believes he will. But after about nine months he may well have discontinued his use, and he almost certainly does not know the most important reason why. Our research suggests that "lack of discipline," "insufficient motivation," "lack of felt results," "the inherent inability to reverse old habits," and "difficulty making the future as real as the present" are all poor explanations.
The failure to enact visible goals is often due to the "success" of enacting unseen ones. For example, this person may have an unrecognized goal "to not feel like a chronically sick person" (which being on a permanent prescription happens to make him feel) or "to not feel like an old person" or "to not feel like I need a crutch in order to get by" or any other self-protective goal. While his discontinuation is a kind of failure, with respect to his sincere and visible goal, we can now see that it also a kind of "success" with respect to his unseen one. He knows he has "one foot on the gas" (the visible goal to stay on his meds); he doesn't know "the other foot is on the brakes."
Our approach helps people take their foot off the brake.
We know that our approach works extremely well under the following conditions:
1. The person strongly wants to accomplish the goal.
2. The person has a powerful picture of his or her "immunity to change."
3. Via any of several means, the person engages in a series of experiments, over 3-4 months, to test the need to "put on the brakes."
MINDS AT WORK™ offers workshops, coaching and personal consultations to create these last two conditions. MAW Services
