The Rules You Never Wrote

On internal scripts, adaptive capacity, and learning to go astray with intention.

One of the most powerful forces shaping your life right now is probably invisible to you.

Because it’s so much a part of you - it feels so very normal. It’s been with you for as long as you can remember, it’s even possible you were born with it. It’s a part of your DNA.

I’m talking about your internal set of rules.

Over the years I’ve come to realise that most of us are living inside a set of rules we’ve never actually written down. They’re not moral, “thou shalt not” rules. They’re less dramatic than that. Practical. Everyday. The kind that shape how you make decisions without announcing themselves.

What feels sensible.
What feels risky.
What you tell yourself you’re allowed to try — and what never quite makes it onto the table.

If you’re up for an experiment, here’s something I often ask people to do when they’re navigating change they want or have to make: sit down and write your rules out.

Again, not the big philosophical ones. The practical ones, the rules that govern how you make choices. Can you even name them? Do they come easily? Are they written anywhere? Are they explicit — or do they just hover in the background like a feeling you’ve learned to trust or a whispery voice that pipes up when you’re faced with options.

And here’s the question that usually makes people pause: Is anyone outside of you actually enforcing these rules?

Most of the time, the answer is no.

Which is both unsettling and strangely freeing. When you accept the reality of your adult authority you start to accept that most of the responsibility for your choices - or the lack of them - lies with you.

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The real drivers of change are rarely visible

After decades of working in change — across individuals, organisations, cultures, and wildly different contexts — one pattern has become impossible for me to ignore.

We spend enormous energy focusing on the visible architecture of change.

Goals.
Plans.
Process.

All the explicit, measurable, rational pieces. But the real drivers are often vague and invisible. And, yeah, irrational in the sense that we act like we come with a set of operating instructions when in fact we’re making this whole thing up.

People carry around internal scripts — rules they didn’t consciously write — about what’s acceptable, what’s possible, and what they’re allowed to do. Those scripts quietly shape behaviour - defining the edges of what feels safe to consider. They become a default operating system that runs in the background of every decision - animating your options. And even more importantly, your sense of whether you have options at all.

Most people don’t even realise they’re operating inside these rules. When someone says, “I could never do that,” or “That’s just not how things work,” or “It wouldn’t make sense for me,” I’m rarely hearing a fixed reality. I’m hearing an invisible rule.

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Why this matters so much right now

There are moments in life when you can operate on autopilot — when the external rules are stable enough that you don’t have to examine your internal ones too closely.

This is not one of those moments.

We’re living through a period where external rules are shifting faster than most of us have ever experienced. Careers don’t unfold the way they used to. Roles evolve midstream. Entire industries reconfigure themselves while people are still trying to make sense of what comes next.

And when the environment changes this quickly, something interesting happens.

The invisible rules you’ve been living by start to rub up against reality.

What once felt sensible starts to feel constraining.
What once felt responsible starts to feel limiting.
What once felt safe starts to feel… small.

This is where adaptive capacity becomes less about strategy and more about awareness. Because if you don’t know which rules you believe you’re living under, you can’t see the ways they might be holding you back.

You hesitate without knowing why.
You hold back without meaning to.
You keep operating from an old script even as the world around you changes.

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Go Astray, differently

This is part of what I mean when I talk about Permission #2: Go Astray.

“Astray” is a strange word, because it assumes there’s a fixed path you’re supposed to follow. But what if the path itself is built from assumptions you never examined?

What if going astray isn’t rebellion — but awareness?

The moment you realise that many of the rules shaping your choices aren’t universal truths. They’re interpretations. Habits. Patterns you’ve carried forward because they once made sense.

Not every rule needs to be discarded; some of them still serve you. But until you can see them clearly, you don’t actually know whether you’re choosing your path… or just continuing a script you inherited long ago. You’re not activating your agency; you’re working on autopilot.

In this context Going Astray isn’t about making rebellious choices, it’s about making intentional ones.

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This isn’t just personal

What’s fascinating is that I see the exact same dynamic inside teams.

Organisations talk about innovation and adaptability. Leaders encourage experimentation and fresh thinking. And yet people are still navigating invisible rules about what’s safe to say, what’s acceptable to question, and how far they’re allowed to go.

Until those rules are surfaced, change stays theoretical. People nod along with new strategies but continue operating inside old assumptions.

That’s a big part of the thinking behind the Permissions Labs I’m launching this year. I’m creating a space for teams to make the invisible visible — for them to recognise the scripts they’re working inside and decide, consciously, what they want to carry forward… and what they’re ready to rewrite.

Because permission isn’t a pep talk. It’s a practice. The practice of noticing the rules you’ve been following, asking whether they still belong to you, and deciding to write new ones.

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Picking up the pen

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of watching people navigate profound change: most of the limits shaping your life or work aren’t fixed realities. They’re rules you’ve kept following long after the world moved on. So as much as change is about engaging with external realities and forces, some of the most powerful work is inside, with the self, you engaging with self and story.

Yes it can feel strange — even a little uncomfortable — to start writing your own. Not because you’re doing something wrong. Because you’re stepping outside a script that once kept everything familiar and predictable. You’re taking intentional steps rather than gliding along on the people carrier.

But that’s often where new movement begins.

Not in a dramatic leap, but in a quiet realisation:

You were never just following the rules.

You were helping write them all along.

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Permissions Labs are spaces where teams slow down long enough to surface their invisible rules and hidden scripts together — to name what’s shaping behaviour, and to practise new ways of working in real time. If this idea resonates, please reach out. I’d love to tell you more.