Why You Should Welcome Resistance

Have you ever tried to support someone to take on what was next, only to have them resist what you are providing?

It’s a frustrating experience, it tends to lead to a lot of breakdowns in leadership.

When it comes to leading, developing people and our own growth, we don’t tend to understand resistance very well. Here’s why.

The first reason is that your own resistance never really occurs like resistance. When we’re in resistance to something, it’s very rare that we’re actively thinking “I don’t want this to happen and I’m going to resist it”.

Instead, our resistance occurs like a well-thought, very reasonable argument about the way you, the world, or your circumstances are.

For example, I don’t think “Oh, I could propose to this company a rate two times above the market, but I’m afraid and resistant to them saying No.” — I think “It’s important that I know what the going rate in the market is, because that’s what I can charge.”

This doesn’t occur, internally, like resistance, because I can’t see the water that I swim in. It occurs like “the way the world is” and “the way things are”, and consequently, “the right way to show up”.

The second reason for this breakdown in leadership is that we, because of the first point, don’t have much reverence for our own process and its accompanying resistance.

Because we fail to see our resistance for what it is, we tend to quickly get frustrated with our lack of capacity to move something forward.

We operate with a belief that we should just be able to “willpower” our way through something (“I know what I need to do, I just need to do it”), and are quick to bail out of inquiring why we might be in resistance to what we say we want.

The third reason for this breakdown in leadership is that we can only provide to others what we’ve distinguished and been able to give to ourselves.

Without an ability to see our resistance for what it is, and to bring grace and acceptance to it, we’ve got no hope when other people show up this way.

We slap labels on people like “Lazy”, “Uncoachable” and “Not a candidate for leadership”, rather than really seeing their process as something sacred.

We operate with the belief that, if only I knew then what I know now, I could have shortcutted my process and I wouldn’t have had to take as long to get there.

In truth, there was nothing you could have done differently to get here sooner. Your process took precisely as long as it took you. The only real shortcut is learning how to have more grace for yourself — as this allows you to spend less time resisting what is so, and instead be with yourself where you are.

This leaves us with a funny paradox. The best way to move beyond our own resistance is to accept it. To begin holding grace for ourselves, and stop operating with the belief that what is showing up for you is wrong.

When you can hold yourself with this kind of compassion, it makes it easier to hold those you lead.

And from there, someone’s resistance stops being something that is wrong and needing to be fixed — instead, it becomes something you learn to welcome and work with.

Here are some ways you can practise with this:

1. Take note of the things people do that frustrate your leadership. What do they do that you feel is “wrong”, or “shouldn’t be”?

2. Discover the ways that you are either the mirror or the foil to these tendencies. Where do you show up the same way? Where are you unwilling to show up this way, and consequently show up as the opposite?

3. Start relating to this as your resistance, and begin getting curious about what there is for you to learn through this resistance.

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