Community Spotlight: Dr Natalie Chambers and the rules we didn't choose

How many of the rules you live by did you actually choose?

That question sits at the centre of my latest Community Spotlight conversation with Dr Natalie Chambers, counselling psychologist and founder of We Are Breaking the Rules.

Natalie first became interested in rules through work around food, bodies and exercise. But, as she describes in our conversation, once she started noticing them she began to see rules everywhere.

Some are explicit. Many are not.

They can shape what we think our careers should look like, how we believe women should behave, what we should have achieved by a particular age, how much money it is acceptable to earn, what our bodies should look like, and what kinds of choices feel available to us.

Natalie is particularly interested in where those rules come from. We absorb messages from families, workplaces, professional cultures, religion, television, advertising and the wider societies in which we grow up. Over time, those influences can become so familiar that they stop feeling like influences at all. They simply become the way things are.

The consequence is that we can end up moving through life on autopilot, following rules we have never consciously examined and making important decisions without necessarily asking whether those rules still fit the lives we actually want to live.

In our conversation, we also talk about how this landscape is changing through social media and technology.

Influence itself is nothing new. What has changed is the way it reaches us. We no longer encounter advertising only in a clearly marked advert break or on the page of a magazine. It sits in our pockets, travels with us and is woven into the lives of people we may experience as being “just like us”. Natalie talks about the importance of making those influences visible and developing the critical thinking skills that help us recognise what is shaping our choices.

What I particularly value about Natalie’s work is the absence of judgement in it. She is not suggesting that people are foolish for being influenced or that the answer is to become somehow immune to culture. As she says, being influenced is human. The invitation is simply to become more curious about it.

Once a rule becomes visible, we can start asking different questions. Where did this come from? Is it still useful? Does it fit the person I am now? What might I choose if I were not simply following an inherited “should”?

Natalie is beginning to develop this work in a number of directions, including more focused coaching around transitions and a workshop for parents who want to help their children navigate the online world with stronger critical thinking skills. 

But the broader idea behind the work is perhaps most clearly captured in the phrase she uses towards the end of our conversation: living consciously.

For Natalie, that means stepping out of autopilot and beginning to question the assumptions that quietly organise our lives. It is not about breaking every rule. It is about making the rules visible enough that we have a genuine choice about whether we still want to live by them.

Watch the full Community Spotlight conversation with Dr Natalie Chambers below.

About Community Spotlight

Community Spotlight is a series of conversations with members of our Leading Practitioners Community about the work they are developing and the people and communities they hope it will serve.

We use these conversations to explore how psychologists are taking their expertise into questions that matter to them, developing new applications of their work, and learning through contact with the people and communities around them.

Find out more about the Leading Practitioners Community

You can find Natalie at wearebreakingtherules.co.uk and through her Living Consciously writing.