Coaching practices for There's a This is Just How It's Done Rule Everyone in My World Treats as Gospel About Success About My Career About How a Life is Supposed to Go and I've Never Stopped to Ask Whether It's Actually True or Just Something I Absorbed and Never Questioned

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For There's a This is Just How It's Done Rule Everyone in My World Treats as Gospel About Success About My Career About How a Life is Supposed to Go and I've Never Stopped to Ask Whether It's Actually True or Just Something I Absorbed and Never Questioned, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• There’s a "this is just how it’s done" rule everyone in my world treats as gospel
• I’ve been treating some rule about how this has to be done as if it were a law of physics, and it just dawned on me that nobody actually decreed it
• There’s this thing I’m treating as obviously true and building everything on top of
• I’m living by a whole set of rules about how life should go, and it’s started to dawn on me that I never actually chose most of them
• I’ve been treating a bunch of "this is just how it has to be" rules as iron law for so long that I’ve stopped seeing them

Practices that may help

1. Question what everyone takes for granted
   Choose one widely shared assumption — in your field, your culture, or your circle — and examine it honestly.
   The Examined Life
2. Identify the constraint you invented: ask "who said it had to be this way?"
   Name one element of your creative work you have never questioned and spend 20 minutes treating it as optional.
   The Beginner’s Mind in Creative Practice
3. 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
4. Conduct a regular examined-life audit
   Periodically ask: which of the beliefs I am living by have I actually examined, and which am I just inheriting?
   The Socratic Method, Made Practical
5. Challenge: systematically question why things are done the way they are
   Ask "Why must this be this way?" for each element of the problem — not to be contrarian, but to find which constraints are real.
   Lateral Thinking, Made Practical
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. Relativising the standards you use to judge yourself
   Notice the standard you are using to evaluate your life and ask where it came from and whether you chose it.
   Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift
8. Make your constraints explicit before solving
   Write out every assumption and rule you are treating as fixed — most problem-solvers carry invisible constraints they never surface.
   Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself
9. Follow explicit rules and procedures without improvisation at the novice stage
   When new to a domain, follow the given rules precisely — understanding comes after compliance, not before.
   The Dreyfus Model: Five Stages from Novice to Expert
10. Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
    Define what success looks like before you act, guided by a personal mission.
    The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Made Practical

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