Coaching Letter #224

On the psychology of change

Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat, New Year’s Day, 2023

Happy New Year! Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you rock. When I was growing up, Christmas was for the children and New Year was the real holiday. My parents and grandparents had very strict traditions around Hogmanay and New Year, which have faded away as traditions do when they are transplanted into a different culture. But I still think of the New Year as momentous, and I wish you all the very best for 2026.

This Coaching Letter is a bridge between the last Coaching Letter on Ron Edmonds and Opportunity to Learn (thank you for all the responses to that CL, especially from readers who knew and worked with Ron Edmonds in New York and Boston, or who studied with him at Harvard—very, very cool—and to Kim Marshall, who sent me a terrific photograph of Ron Edmonds!) and future topics on systemic improvement. What I intend to do over the next few CLs (although there will be some detours and rabbit holes, I can already tell) is talk about some of the organizational and situational factors that make improvement more likely. Because not all change is an improvement, and not all factors that support improvement work every time. So improvement, like life, is an experiment, but there are things you can do to increase the chances of success.

This CL is about the psychology of change. If you are in the business of change, improvement, leading, and learning, you should probably know something about this. The content is drawn in large part from the chapter in Rydell’s and my book, Equitable School Improvement on the psychology of change. And just to be clear, the book is full of useful ideas like these ones. Not for nothing, I came across an email exchange I had with Michael Fullan when it came out, in which he called it “comprehensive, and deeply insightful re the many nuances of equity and change.” I’ll take that to the bank.

This CL is, I admit, kinda long. Here’s the TL;DR version:

1. Change is not dependent on the whims, wishes, or will of individuals. The situation is more powerful than the person: people behave in ways that are supported, rewarded, and made sensible by the systems of which they are a part. When behavior does not change, that is not evidence of individual deficiency; it is information about the system.

2. This is not to say that psychology is unimportant—far from it—but it is often misunderstood. People’s responses to change are remarkably predictable, not idiosyncratic. Defensive behavior is adaptive, not pathological. It is a rational response to perceived threats to competence, identity, or standing, and it is not a reliable indicator of “resistance” or “negativity.”

3. Which is why explanations that rely on the idea that “change is scary,” or that people simply need more “will and skill,” consistently fail. They misdiagnose the problem by locating it in individuals rather than in the conditions under which change is being attempted—and as a result, they offer remedies that are neither accurate nor useful.

So: here’s a helpful (I hope) guide to the psychology of change:

1. Person v. situation. Humans have a strong tendency to explain behavior in terms of personal traits—something people either have or lack—rather than the situations people are in. A classic demonstration of this comes from the Good Samaritan study at Princeton Theological Seminary (Darley & Batson, 1973). Seminary students were asked to prepare a short talk on the Good Samaritan and then sent to another building to deliver it. Along the way, they encountered a man who appeared to need help. The key manipulation was time pressure: some students were told they were late, others that they were on time, and others that they had plenty of time. The results were stark. Only 10% of those who thought they were late stopped to help, compared with 45% of those on time and 63% of those unhurried. Measures of altruism and moral commitment predicted almost nothing; situational pressure predicted nearly everything. Interestingly, while we have a tendency to over-attribute other people’s behavior to traits (like personality characteristics), and under-attribute it to context, we don’t do it when it comes to explaining our own behavior. If a colleague misses a deadline, we think he’s lazy; if I miss a deadline, I think; boy, what a week, I couldn’t possibly have got that invoice in on time. If a teacher does not appear to be adopting a new practice, we think she’s resistant; if I don’t rush to get on board with a new policy, it’s because the school’s not ready for it. In other words, we explain our own failures situationally, and others’ failures dispositionally. It’s called the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). And in truth, we should take more responsibility for our own behavior, and recognize that other people are acting as a result of multiple pressures and competing demands.

2. Trait inflation. This is a close cousin of FAE, but I decided to list it separately. We have names for many psychological constructs, and we use them profligately: fixed/growth mindset, grit, self-starter, resilience, engagement, buy-in, commitment, openness to feedback, adaptability, professionalism, sense of urgency, and “readiness.” But the conditions people find themselves in tend to explain behavior much more cleanly than personality traits. For example, in studies of fixed/growth mindset and performance, the highest achievers do indeed have a growth mindset, but they are also given a learning goal to achieve, and people with a fixed mindset who are given a learning goal outperform those with a growth mindset who are given a performance goal. (The role of learning goals v. performance goals is, I think, one of the most important yet underexploited findings in psychology for improving performance—you can read more about it in CL #21, back when they were short!)

3. Mindset Speaking of mindset, Carol Dweck has cornered the market here and therefore people think there are only two kinds of mindset: fixed and growth. And if you need a primer on those, here’s a summary I wrote when Mindset first came out. But as I like to point out, Mindset is the popular version of a more technical book called Self-Theories, and that’s actually a much more helpful label. Mindset is any theory you have about your own psychology. As I like to say, a mindset is a story you tell yourself about yourself, such as: “I’m a visual learner” (no, you’re not, ); “I’m not a math person” (there is no part of your brain devoted to math—many people struggle with math because of instructional gaps, anxiety, or cumulative misunderstanding, but above all else this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy and probably deserves a Coaching Letter all by itself…); “my memory is terrible” (there are many types of memory and there is normal variation across these types; memory fails in predictable ways, including across the lifespan; you can work on your memory and get better at it, but it’s not like a muscle you can train…). All this is to say that people are complicated, your mindsets frequently trip you up, but mindset is not only fixed/growth, and even if it was, it still doesn’t explain people’s orientation to change, and above all, we shouldn’t think that we can diagnose other people’s mindsets based on their choices about behavior.

4. Defensive reasoning and identity protection. Humans are motivated to see themselves as competent and morally adequate, so when they believe themselves to be in the presence of any kind of threat to that self-assessment, they engage in self-protection through the classic behaviors of denial, justification, attacking the standard, attacking the source, avoidance, and emotional escalation. (I dealt with all of those in a single meeting just the other day…) The key here is that these feel rational to the person implicated; not everyone recognizes when they are being defensive, and it’s one of the many benefits of therapy that you are trained to own your defensiveness, to see it as normal and not something you need to get defensive about. The way out of this is to not put people in a situation where they feel like there is something to defend, and the way to do that is to remove judgment. It’s one of the several reasons why attempting to improve instruction through observation and feedback is always going to be an uphill battle; you put people in a situation where their competence is in question, and if you attach power to that by making the feedback part of a formal evaluation process by a person with authority, then so much the worse. I have people say things to me like, “people need to learn not to take feedback personally,” and while that may be possible, it’s not a smart bet. It would be like deciding that your solution to maintaining your Ferrari is to train me to do it; dubious that it would ever be an efficient use of your time, and just as doubtful that it would ever be effective. Couple of side notes on this one: first, novices tolerate feedback more easily mostly because they know that they are not yet competent, but that window closes quickly; second, people get defensive more quickly when there is an additional layer of threat of embarrassment or moral harm, for example when you suggest to an educator that they are not acting in the best interest of kids.

5. Perceived self-efficacy (PSE) refers to a person’s belief that they can act effectively and that their actions will produce predictable results in the environment they are operating in (here is a one-pager on the topic, and there are slides on self-efficacy in the Coaching Letter Slides). It is not a personality trait and it is not simply confidence; it is a judgment about the relationship between effort and outcome. People develop strong self-efficacy when they experience environments that respond reliably to their actions and they build belief that if they put in effort they will hit the target. When environments are volatile, evaluative, or opaque, self-efficacy erodes, even among capable and motivated people. This is why exhortations to “take risks” or “be more confident” routinely fail: efficacy is shaped less by internal resolve than by whether the system makes learning feel safe, worthwhile, and consequential.

6. Motivation. And related to PSE is motivation, which is a person’s willingness to invest effort toward a goal, based on their expectations about whether that effort will be worthwhile. In education, however, motivation is often treated as a stable personal trait rather than as a contingent state shaped by belief which is in turn shaped by experience. Motivation is frequently misdiagnosed when the real problem is clarity. When people do not know what “good” looks like or how their effort connects to outcomes, disengagement is a predictable and sensible response, not a lack of motivation. When effort does not reliably lead to success, recognition, or meaningful impact, motivation predictably declines (I have come to believe that a lot of students are referred for special education services because they have been in this doom loop so long that their behavior and performance are heavily impacted). We also completely misuse the term “intrinsic”, but that’s for another time… suffice to say that whether people are intrinsically motivated or not is completely irrelevant to organizational decisions to support practice.

7. Psychological safety refers to the belief that one can take risks—ask questions, make mistakes, surface uncertainty—without being punished, humiliated, or written off. Studies of surgical teams and airplane cockpits consistently show that when authority is exercised in ways that imply the most senior person is always right, error rates increase and learning slows. Outcomes improve when power is used to invite dissent, surface uncertainty, and make it safe for lower-status participants to speak up—even when doing so is uncomfortable. Psychological safety, therefore, is not the absence of discomfort; it is a function of how power is exercised in learning environments. In practice, however, safety is often conflated with comfort, and leaders are tempted to respond to anticipated discomfort by lowering cognitive demand, smoothing over struggle, or avoiding topics that may cause unease—like equity, for example. I am frequently hired specifically to engage people in the realization that their current ways of teaching, coaching and leading may not be the most effective for all students. I am, therefore, going to create some discomfort, and often get the feedback that I have not created a warm, welcoming environment, or that people feel emotionally unsafe. That’s not actually my intent, and I would love it if I didn’t ever have to point out to someone in front of an entire staff that they are not actually a visual learner when they are very invested in that belief. Nevertheless, I do wonder whether the construct of psychological safety is providing cover for the misconception that learning should not feel unsettling, that being challenged is a form of harm, and that the work of improvement can proceed without anyone having to revise an assumption or relinquish a familiar practice. The environment that leaders have to create, then, is simultaneously psychologically safe without being comfortable at the expense of opportunity to learn—for adults and students.

Reading this over, I realize that what I have done over and over again is just make the case that psychology is less important than situation—that state trumps trait. OK, cool.

I can provide more references for all of these constructs, so, as always, please feel free to email me if you want more information. My goal here is not to turn you all into psychologists, because I know you have full-time jobs already; my goal is to make the point that we have broad, deep and voluminous research on personal psychology especially regarding change. This includes plenty of books that suggest that change is huge and daunting and people resist it (including, for example, Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan, and Change or Die by Alan Deutschman). But we also have mountains of literature on how to support change, including many Coaching Letters, and books such as Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef, and How to Change by Katy Milkman. So all I’m asking is that you don’t accept as inevitable the idea that people will resist change, because that’s a weak theory and absolves leaders of the responsibility of ensuring that people are more influenced by the conditions they work in than their “mindset”.

As always, I would love feedback and I do reply to every email. Thank you, as always, for reading the Coaching Letter, and let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. All the best, Isobel