For over 20 years, my job was helping social change organizations figure out how change happens. Not how they hoped it would happen but how it actually would, given the real world, real people and real assumptions. The tool we used was called a Theory of Change.
The tool has its limitations but I liked the main question it asks. If you want a certain outcome, what has to be true? What are you doing, why are you doing it, and what are you assuming along the way? It's less of a strategy document and more of a belief audit. A way of making the invisible logic visible.
This weekend I was talking to my son about choice, which led us to talk about assumptions and beliefs, and then I explained the theory of change reflective process.
Imagine we designed our own theory of life? I told him. That would unpack the operating system that is running in the background and shaping every decision we make, including the ones we don't make?
Why This Matters
Most of us are living inside a "theory of life" we didn't really choose. Maybe it was handed to us by family, or culture, or even fear. And because we absorbed it early, we mistake it for reality. We don't see it as a belief but as just the way things are.
And that's the problem.
Because when you don't examine your theory of life, you can't really author it. You can set all the goals you want, build all the vision boards, write all the intentions, if the beliefs underneath don't change, you end up recreating the same patterns dressed in new clothes.
That's why the work has to begin underneath. The process I want to walk you through borrows the same logic the theory of change uses on an organization to make the invisible visible, then decide what to do with it in three moves: observe, sort, rewrite.
Move 1: Observe What You're Doing
Don't start with what you want, start with what you're doing and work backwards.
Your behavior is the most honest data you have. More honest than your journal entries, more honest than what you tell your friends, more honest than your own self-perception. What you consistently do -and consistently avoid- is a direct window into what you actually believe.
Here are a few questions to sit with:
- What have you been postponing, for months, maybe years? What does that say you actually believe about that thing, or about yourself in relation to it?
- What do you keep doing even though it drains you? What do you believe would happen if you stopped?
- What do you never let yourself want out loud? What's the belief that makes it feel safer to not want it?
- Where are you working very hard but nothing is moving? What are you assuming about how that change is supposed to happen?
Write the answers down as they come to you. Don't edit them because this is your operative theory of life. The real one, not the aspirational one. Most people have never observed it before.
Move 2: Sort What You Chose
Once you have your operative theory on paper, you sort it. Not into true and false, it wouldn't be helpful, and most of these beliefs have some truth threaded through them. You sort into three piles:
If your experience is anything like mine, most of what you'll find will fall into "inherited" or "expired". Suggesting that we absorb far more than we choose.
The goal isn't to get rid everything that we have inherited because some of it is wisdom and not baggage. That is why it so important to know the difference. Because an inherited belief that you've examined and consciously kept is now a chosen one. And that changes everything about how you live.
Questions for this move:
- Where did this belief come from? Can you actually trace it?
- Did the person or moment it came from have the same life you're trying to build?
- Is this belief protecting you or just keeping you small in the name of protection?
- If a younger version of you needed this belief to survive, does the current version still need it to thrive?
Move 3: Rewrite Toward What's Actually True
This is the move I procrastinated forever to start. I did my observation and had a list, I went through the discomfort of clustering into the 3 categories and I wanted to stop.
Don't do that.
The rewrite is not positive thinking or about replacing hard truths with feel-goods. It's about writing a more honest version of the assumption, one that reflects what you actually observe when you look clearly, not what fear told you when you were eleven.
The format is simple:
"I used to operate as if [old belief]. The more honest version is [what I actually see to be true when I look clearly]."
For example:
I used to operate as if there was a limited amount of good things and I had to fight to deserve my share. The more honest version is that I have watched abundance find me when I stop hoarding energy against it.
I used to operate as if being too much was dangerous. The more honest version is that the people who said that were protecting their own comfort, not my growth.
I used to operate as if timing was something I controlled. The more honest version is that some things ripen on their own schedule and my job is to stay ready.
These are corrections, not affirmations. They are small, honest, grounded revisions to the "document" you've been living inside. This whole process was about claiming authorship of your own life and defining your operating theory for it.
Maktoub or destiny, as I've come to understand it, is co-authorship. You bring the intention, your niya, make the choice to show up and stay open to what meets you halfway.
Your theory of life is already written somewhere in your habits, your hesitations and patterns. The work is just reading it honestly, then, slowly and deliberately, picking up the pen and correcting it.
Heartfully,
Ratiba
