Shattered Assumptions: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

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

Practices that may help

1. Map the assumptive world the loss disrupted
   Identify which of your core beliefs about life, self, and the future the loss has challenged.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
2. 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
3. Separate facts from assumptions explicitly
   Sort what you actually know from what you’re assuming, in two visible columns.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
4. Surface and test underlying assumptions
   Identify the implicit assumptions that your reasoning depends on and test whether they hold.
   Socratic Questioning
5. Surface and test the mental models driving behavior
   Make the assumptions behind decisions explicit — they are often the root structural cause.
   Systems Thinking
6. Deconstruct the problem to its fundamentals
   Break the problem into the few things you actually know to be true, with no inherited conclusions.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
7. Name the assumptions that must hold for the plan to work
   Every plan rests on assumptions — list them and ask how likely each one is.
   Margin of Safety
8. 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
9. 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
10. Negotiate from abundance, not scarcity
    Question the assumption that what one side gains the other must lose.
    The Third Alternative, Made Practical

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

• Since they died, the whole ground I stood on is gone→
• My conclusion only makes sense because of a bunch of things I’m silently taking for granted about people and how the world works→
• 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→
• 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→
• My team keeps landing in the same wrong place no matter how we tweak our actions, and it’s dawning on me that the real problem is some unspoken belief we all just take as how-the-world-works→

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.