Once you’ve identified what your immune system is, our approach says now the next step is: What other core beliefs do you have that lead you to be protecting yourself like that? Here is a classic example: Somebody wants to be more collaborative. They recognize they are not really listening to people, they cut people off, they insert their own ideas, and so on. So they try to be better listeners, but they can’t. Why? What’s happening is they need to be in control. They need to be the person who is kind of the big cheese. They need to be the person who is getting the credit. They really do have the goal to be collaborative, but at the very same time they have this goal which is to be the person who is getting all of the credit and having it go their way.

Perhaps this person’s belief is, “I assume that if I really allowed other people to have their handprint on things, I would reduce my value, I reduce my exceptional kind of identity.” Now the exploration begins, which is basically: Is it possible that by you being a listener, you can actually still be valuable and still be providing something for people in the organization which is very important for them, but it’s not your thumbprint or idea that is getting out? But now you are cultivating lots of people’s ideas so you become maybe open to the possibility that your value is about creating the container for great ideas to emerge. People see you as incredibly valuable for orchestrating the conversation in such a way where everybody is bringing their best stuff to their work. That would be a pretty amazing thing to find out, right? But you can’t know that if somebody just goes at it at a behavioral level and says, “Okay, I am going to listen more” and say they have none of this understanding of the deeper stuff that is going on there, behind the scenes.

How should someone go about setting a New Year's Resolution?

There are two fundamentally different kinds of goals that people can make. We are drawing on work of colleagues of ours here at Harvard in the Kennedy School. They talk about “adaptive goals” and “technical goals.” If you have a resolution that is about a technical goal, that is something that you develop, a skill. If you have access to information, you can probably actually pull up how to learn this new skill. Technical goals make for really good New Year’s resolutions for people because that you can go at in a much more behavioral, sequential, logical level.

But an adaptive goal, that’s the kind of goal that in order for you to accomplish it, it really requires that something inside of you has to be altered. A belief system and the feelings that go with it, those may not be right for New Year’s resolutions. Using a New Year’s resolution approach, the best goals to go for are the ones that are just technical for you. For example, for some people, losing weight is a technical goal. They figure out how they are going to reduce calories, they learn how to say no in situations they can predict they are going to overeat, and they can lose weight and they can keep the weight off. And that’s terrific and you can say it was a technical problem. But for the vast majority of people, losing weight is an adaptive goal and they’ve got to examine what are the other things that are going on inside of them.