Coaching practices for How to Examine Your Assumptions

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Examine Your Assumptions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My conclusion only makes sense because of a bunch of things I’m silently taking for granted about people and how the world works
• There’s this thing I’m treating as obviously true and building everything on top of
• My conclusion feels airtight and yet something nags at me, and I think it’s that the whole thing only holds if a couple of unspoken things are true
• In my head the things I’m sure of and the things I’m just guessing at all run together as one blur, so I end up treating my assumptions like hard limits
• I’m grinding hard on "how do I fix this" and a quiet doubt keeps surfacing that I might be solving the wrong problem entirely

Practices that may help

1. Surface and examine the assumptions you are making
   Name the assumptions filling the gap between the data you selected and the interpretation you reached.
   The Ladder of Inference
2. Use Socratic questioning to test each belief
   Interrogate every claim with “how do I know this is true?” until only bedrock remains.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
3. Surface and test underlying assumptions
   Identify the implicit assumptions that your reasoning depends on and test whether they hold.
   Socratic Questioning
4. Separate facts from assumptions explicitly
   Sort what you actually know from what you’re assuming, in two visible columns.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
5. Question the question itself
   Before answering a question, ask whether it is the right question and whether it is framed to produce useful answers.
   Socratic Questioning
6. The assumption audit
   Surface and question the beliefs that are driving a current decision or conflict.
   Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice
7. Test the big assumption behind your immunity
   Design a small experiment to check whether the assumption keeping you stuck is actually true.
   Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
8. Question your own assumptions with Socratic rigor
   Take a belief you hold confidently and submit it to the Socratic question: "What do you actually mean by that?"
   The Examined Life
9. Map and stress-test your key assumptions
   Before executing, list the assumptions the plan depends on — then ask which ones would kill it if wrong.
   Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail
10. Review past beliefs for what evidence did and didn’t move them
    Look back at past beliefs and ask: what would have changed my mind then, and did I let it?
    Falsification Thinking

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