The Priors That Hold You

Predictive processing and a complexity approach to personal transformation

cowritten by Adrian Wagner & Anne Caspari

In leadership development and coaching, people often try to create lasting change through new beliefs, positive affirmations or, worse, mindset training. But lasting transformation does not happen by repeating new sentences or resetting the mind, as we switch a computer on and off. It rather happens when the nervous system learns a new way of relating to reality.

At Complexity Partners, we work with two types of inner patterns that shape how people behave: primary intentions — the clear, authentic impulses that guide us — and secondary interferences — the responses that arise in reaction to those impulses, often as doubts, habits, or internalised voices.

Understanding and working with these patterns helps people reconnect with their own clarity, navigate relationships with more ease, and bring greater coherence to how they lead and live.

Primary Intentions: Directing Attention towards a Clear Intention

"Primaries" direct our attention towards clear intentions. They express a general or specific direction we want to experience in life. Examples are:

• I trust myself

• I am worthy of being paid fairly

• I say what is true for me

• I am allowed to take space
  

Primary intentions communicate who we want to become. Yet almost everyone has had the experience of believing something consciously while still acting against it. This is where secondary interferences, mostly in the form of unexamined beliefs, enter.

Secondary Interference: Predictive Survival Beliefs

"Secondaries" are beliefs and embodied reactions held unconsciously, formed through past emotional experience. They are held in the body-mind system, in distributed cognition, embedded in the context you grow up in. Examples can be:

• If I speak honestly, I will be rejected

• If I succeed, others will resent me

• If I show vulnerability, I will be hurt

• If I ask for what I need, I will lose my belonging
  

These secondary patterns shape identity and behaviour far more than we realise. When primary intentions and conditioned, protected responses are in conflict, secondaries dominate because they are linked to safety and survival.

The Predictive Mind: Why 'Secondaries' Can Run Our Lives

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark argues in Surfing Uncertainty (2016) that the brain is a prediction engine: through predictive processing, the brain does not passively observe reality. It constantly predicts what will happen next based on prior experience, sensory signals, clues from the outside world or learned conditioning. In The Experience Machine (2023), he presents this predictive-processing framework to a broader audience. These predictions shape perception and sculpt our experience in the first place. Andy Clark calls such predictions priors. Priors are sensemaking shortcuts that filter reality even before perception and experience.

Secondary interferences are exactly that: predictions about a felt sense of safety. It is important that predictions are in general intelligent functions of our overall organism to minimise danger in a given context and time. Trauma, for example, can also be understood as an adaptive survival function of our nervous system that prevents life-threatening overwhelm (Hübl, 2023). Unfortunately, if not integrated, trauma produces priors (predictions) that influence our perception and experience long after the actual traumatic experience. One drastic example is a soldier who serves in a war zone. He will learn to listen carefully to any kind of noise around him; his attention to loud or sudden movements in crowds is critical for survival. Back home, those priors that saved him on the battlefield are hard-wired and in conflict with a peaceful reality; the pop of a balloon will feel like being at the front in Ukraine.

Similar in structure, though not as existential, are Robert Kegan's 'immunities to change': hidden assumptions that block us from doing something that seems to threaten our safety. We borrow the term here in a narrower sense — as protective, conditioned assumptions. Regardless of whether it is trauma or immunities to change, our priors, the predictive processing of our cognition, always shape what we perceive and experience. Such protective priors tell us what is possible, what is dangerous and what we are allowed to experience. As long as these predictive beliefs remain unexamined, they silently steer our choices even if the environment has changed and is safe.

Loosening the Grip of Secondary Interferences

Most coaching approaches focus on strengthening primary intentions, visions, purpose or goals. But this does not work if protected priors remain active in the body, mind, and consciousness. Instead of trying to suppress or bypass that secondary interference, we bring it into awareness and dissipate its energy.

For example, if someone is entangled in the prior belief structure of:

I want to show up. If I show up, I will get hurt. That pain is so fundamentally threatening that I don't want to ever experience that (again). Getting my voice heard is actually not so important. I will stay where I am. Leave me alone.

The full entangled structure — not any single belief within it — is what generates the prediction error, even when the situation carries no real threat. Some of these predictions — "if I show up I will be hurt" — fire very rapidly and below the threshold of awareness, inaccessible to introspection or deliberate reasoning.

Approaching what holds the structure in place tends to meet active deflection: tiredness, distraction, a sudden sense that none of this matters. This self-protective dynamic is what we referred to earlier as immunity to change. To shift the prediction error, we invite leaders to work with the whole pattern structure playfully and deliberately, so the precision weighting can move towards a more actualised reading of the present situation. In doing so, they might:

• Shrink physically

• Speak so quietly they can barely be heard

• Apologise for existing
  

The belief becomes visible as a behavioural pattern rather than as a 'truth'. When the pattern is expressed consciously, and the predicted catastrophe does not arrive, the mismatch registers as a prediction error: the sensory evidence of the here and now contradicts the old forecast, and the precision weighting of the prior can shift. This loosens the predictive grip of the prior "truth", now recognised as a secondary interference. In essence, this is what Kegan calls the subject-object move: a belief pattern you were subject to becomes an object in your space. A conscious choice is now possible.

Embodying the Primary Intentions

Once the grip of an enacted pattern softens, the (self-)system becomes available for new beliefs and behaviours. This is the time to bring in primary intentions. They must be embodied. This happens best in relationship, where others give direct feedback. When someone voices a primary intention, such as:

• My voice matters

• I am allowed to take space

• My needs are valid

Participants are invited to feel it in their body and speak it as truth. Others may respond:

• I believe you, I can feel it

• Say it again, something is not yet aligned

• That is it, now your body agrees

  
  

Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue in their 1998 paper "The Extended Mind" that thinking is not confined to the brain. It extends into the body, the environment, and the relational field.

The 4Es in cognitive science describe how cognition is Embodied not just in the brain, Embedded in particular contexts and histories, Enacted in real life, and Extended into the world beyond our minds and bodies. This is why transformation cannot happen through insight alone — it must reach into the body and into the relational and cultural contexts where the patterns are held. Rather than a simple tool or process, this requires a complexity-informed approach.

This is also why positive suggestions or affirmations, applied without prior work on the secondaries, rarely produce lasting change — and can, in the worst case, be counterproductive. They operate at the cognitive and verbal level, leaving the embodied, embedded, enacted and extended dimensions of the pattern untouched. More critically, a positive suggestion that directly contradicts a strongly held prior doesn't simply fail to register — it can activate the counter-prediction with greater force than before. The secondary fires precisely because the incoming signal threatens what the system has learned to protect. The prior belief — "my voice does not matter," "I am not allowed to take space" — becomes more active, not less.

A Complexity Perspective

Dave Snowden reminds us that in complex systems, change does not follow linear cause-and-effect. It emerges through small safe-to-fail experiments: previous interaction patterns are disturbed, new ones form, and what emerges is not a new reality directly but a new dispositional state — a shift in the conditions from which new behaviour can arise.

Working on the dissipation of the energy held in the prior, and the enactment of a new relational attitude, is precisely such an experiment. It does not install new content or aim at a predetermined outcome. It shifts the conditions under which the predictive system operates, allowing it to recalibrate rather than defend. What becomes available from that cannot be scripted in advance. This is what distinguishes the approach from techniques that attempt to replace old patterns with new ones directly.

Predictive Freedom and Self-Leadership

The purpose of this work is to widen the field of what a person can perceive, choose and do. Secondary interferences, as long as they remain unexamined, quietly narrow that field — not through weakness or irrationality, but through predictions that were once accurate and have not yet been updated. When those predictions are brought into awareness and met with the evidence of the present moment, they lose their unconditional grip. The substrate changes and new behaviour becomes possible without having to be forced.

Leadership in conditions of complexity requires exactly this kind of inner adaptability — not persuasion, goodwill or tougher resolve, but nervous systems capable of updating their predictions in response to what is actually here.

This piece maps the conceptual territory. What we actually do with it — in a practical and experiential way, in rooms, in nature, with bodies, in relationship — happens in our the Transformation Intensive onsite.

Pictures by Anne Caspari

References

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press.

Clark, A. (2023). The experience machine: How our minds predict and shape reality. Penguin Books.

Hübl, T. (2023). Attuned: Practicing interdependence to heal our trauma—and our world. Sounds True.

Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Harvard Business Press.

Snowden, D. (2010). The Cynefin framework. Cognitive Edge.