This workshop and optional 4-week small group will introduce practices and coaching support for achievement of personal improvement goals that matter to us. The Immunity to Change™ process uncovers our sub-conscious barriers to making positive changes in our lives, and provides a framework for removing those barriers. Many of us experience how difficult it can be to change our behaviors, even when the change is positive and necessary. This process aims to enable you to accomplish specific personal improvements that are important to you, but have proven resistant to prior efforts. This workshop will be highly experiential, and draw on spiritual and embodiment practices to support the mind/body connection and integrate the behavior shifts that become possible through this work.
Structure:
This offering is a combination of a half-day workshop and an optional free 4-week group. During the workshop participants will:
Identify a simple, manageable, and meaningful improvement goal
Through facilitator’s direction and peer support, move through a step-by-step mapping system to identify the undesired behavior, and the “counter commitments” and “big assumptions” they hold that prevent them from making the change they desire.
Design a simple SMART (Safe, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) experiment to test their assumptions, and begin to try on the new desired behavior. This will be the first of 3-4 rounds to SMART tests that will be supported and explored through the learning group (description below)
Learn meditative and mind/body embodiment practices to support this work
During the optional 4-week learning group participants will:
Continue engaging meditation and embodiment practices that support us in overcoming our resistance to change
Work with improvement goals in a community of learning and support
Receive coaching and peer support as they work with their SMART tests and integrate their goal
Logistics:
This class is offered through Integrated Spirituality at Davis Community Church.
The half-day workshop is on September 7th, 9:00am - 1:00pm, followed by the small group held 4 Tuesdays: Sept. 10, 17, 24, Oct. 1. from 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Investment, Scholarships & Registration:
The cost of this experience is $75, with no additional cost for the 4-week group. Some scholarship funds available and free childcare is offered with advanced arrangement. Simply email Elisa Stone to request either form of support (elisa@dccpres.org)
Please feel free to send questions to me at michaela@heartscapesinsight.com. NOTE: When you register, please indicate whether you wish to participate in the optional group support.
Further Description of the Overcoming Immunity to Change Method:
Most of us have had the experience of setting an improvement goal for ourselves, something we very much want to change in our lives, and finding that for reasons that are confounding to us, we are unable to sustain the change necessary to reach the goal. Many people endeavor, for example, to lose weight as their New Year’s resolution, but struggle to maintain the changes necessary to do it. The self-abusing guilt and shame that come from this experience arise from the belief that we have failed to make positive change, and that there must therefore be something wrong with us.
The breakthrough discovery made by professors by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is that the scenario described above does not represent a failure. In fact, it represents the success of an internal system of beliefs and mind-sets—dubbed our “immunity to change”—that developed as a form of self-protection. The inability to shift eating habits might reflect a hidden belief for someone that food represents the love of family in their life. For another person, the excess weight could be a form of protection against unwanted attention. In either case, recognition of the hidden beliefs can both sooth any guilt associated with the struggle to lose weight, and can also open up a path towards shifting the beliefs so that the goal can be reached.
The Immunity to Change™ process uncovers our sub-conscious barriers to making positive changes in our lives, and provides a framework for removing those barriers. This process aims to enable you to accomplish specific personal improvements that are important to you, but have proven resistant to prior efforts. These improvement goals can come from any realm of life, and could include: Health and wellness goals, speaking up for ourselves more, communicating more directly about our needs, asking for help, or delegating tasks more easily.