On a recent podcast episode of “Teams Transformed” I shared a Team Coaching experience that has stayed with me.
My co-coach and I had been working with a large leadership team for months. In one of our final days together, something shifted. You could feel the tension had been building throughout the morning. Then a moment of emergence, and I felt a pull toward an intervention we hadn’t planned on the agenda for the day.
Right behind that pull to *do something*, was a wave of doubt – “this might not go well”, I thought.
What I’ve been sitting with since then is that I didn’t ignore the doubt, I just didn’t let it decide what I was going to do.
That’s a difference in choice that many leaders face.
In Gestalt practice, there’s a concept worth borrowing here, the idea that what is present in the moment is information. The tension in the room was information. My pull toward the intervention was information. And the doubt I felt? Also information. The question isn’t how to silence or squash it. The question I’ve reflected on: what is the doubt protecting?
This is where Immunity to Change work becomes useful for leaders. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe what they call “hidden competing commitments”; the quiet, often unconscious promises we’ve made to ourselves that run underneath our stated intentions. In short, these are things that unconsciously get in the way of the things we’d rather do. When doubt camps out before a move you believe in, it’s worth asking whether there’s a competing commitment underneath it. A commitment to being liked. To not disrupting. To not being wrong in front of others. These are common commitments I’ve felt over the years.
Naming the hidden competing commitment isn’t a cure-all, but it can change your relationship to doubt. You’re no longer its passenger, you can have a choice in what you do.
Here’s a small experiment to try this week:
The next time doubt shows up before you make a move you think will matter: pause. Not to push yourself through it or talk yourself out of it. Just long enough to ask: What am I aware of right now? What is this doubt protecting?
If you still feel the pull to make a move in the moment, treat it like an experiment. Not a performance, just an experiment. You have a hunch of what could happen, be curious about it, not committed to being right about it. That small shift from certainty to curiosity can quiet the doubt more than “pushing through it” ever will.
What is doubt protecting for you right now? What could you try, just as an experiment, if you trusted the feeling underneath it?
Here are a few resources that I’ve found interesting and have been sharing with clients:
1 // There are layers to the “fear onion,” and one of them is FOPO, or Fear of Other People’s Opinion. (20 min podcast)
2 // It might seem boring, but you only need 10 people for your new idea, product, or business.(2 min read)
3 // Every team needs a deviant, someone who says, “Why are we even doing this at all?” (10 min read)
