All Resistance is Resistance
Estimated Reading Time: 6-8 Minutes
If you are reading this, and you are a leader, you know the feeling where you put your idea, decision, point of view out into your community and you feel pushback.
People pushback in all sorts of interesting and unique ways, but the important point here is that we can feel it, see it, hear it, smell it, perceive it. We may not know everything about who resists for what reason, but we know it is there, even if we don’t want to acknowledge its existence.
In the meeting after the meeting, we might complain or commiserate with colleagues who will confirm for us that our idea is fine, it is just certain employees that are “resistant”. We might pile on and complain that nobody likes change or that certain faculty are just not innovating or interested in new ideas. We vent to try and alleviate the feeling we have inside us when we put ourselves out there and it is not accepted in the way we would like.
I would like to pause here and zoom in on this moment. What is actually happening with us and with others, and is there a way to understand and reframe this moment so as to create new pathways and new options?
What is happening with our feelings: We feel something when we get pushback. Most likely, fear, sadness, embarrassment or anger or some unique and proprietary mix that we have spent a lifetime preparing.
What are we thinking? Most likely something like, “If these people understood better, they would love this idea as much as I do.” or “These people always hate my ideas, I knew it.” or “These people just don’t get it.” or ______________. There are actually endless variations on these themes of they don’t get it, they are wrong or they are mean and spiteful and they have chosen me as their target. The common theme to these thinking patterns though is that the “resistance” is happening to you.
What we usually do: The most common response when meeting resistance is to explain further in a way that is redundant. It signals, if these people just had more information or more context, they would perceive this idea differently. It signals, maybe they didn’t hear me the first time, I will try again. In addition, we may get red in our neck or face, hold our breath, and increase our pace of speech in order to argue, defend or debate. It is important to realize that different people have different responses to threat, but the common thread is that we feel threatened by pushback.
What is under threat? Our identity. Your colleagues were pushing back on your idea, but you felt the pushback on your identity. This is where we diverge and get in trouble with our colleagues. We move forward with snap judgements about them to protect our identity because it is attached to our ideas. We defend. They move forward with snap judgements about us because the way we respond clearly communicates our displeasure with their feedback. If you ask people for feedback and then respond like this, they will experience this as a threat to their identity. They will feel embarrassed, fear, anger or some mix, and it will sometimes trigger in them identical and mirror responses. it is worth noting explicitly that you cannot judge whether you are defensive or not. You must ask other people. If you don't want to ask others, then you don't need to because you have your answer. You are defended.
Where this leads: In these scenarios, both parties or groups walk away feeling judged inaccurately, and convinced that the other is resistant. This plays out in the micro and macro in schools of all shapes and sizes.
Resistance Re-Imagined
I am inviting you to see resistance in a different way.
Any time you feel resistance from others, you are feeling yourself, not them.
When you argue, debate, defend, explain or re-iterate in search of less resistance, you are embodying resistance.
So in essence, when you feel resistance, you are right, you are just usually projecting that resistance on other people, and you need to reclaim the projection and understand that the feeling you are feeling is actually your resistance. You are resisting them. What they are doing. What they are saying. In these moments, we make up wild and inaccurate stories about them in our mind to protect our identity and ego.
If we look at this through an example, you might imagine you are leading a faculty meeting and your job is to communicate a decision that has been made by a group of administrators to a group of faculty and staff. You are nervous ahead of time (a sign that you have attached your identity to your decisions).
You communicate the decision and you get a mountain of pushback. Your fear is realized, you are now in front of a group of people that you perceive as angry, resistant and not open to your identity. You respond defensively. This is then interpreted by them as confirmation that you are not open to their feedback even though you asked, and they respond defensively which confirms your egos initial assessment that they are not open to your ideas and resistant. This pattern is predictable and if you are trained to see it, you can see it developing before it even begins.
Three Types of Intervention:
Inner Work: The way people orient themselves to judgement from others is largely impacted by the way they formed attachment with their primary caregivers when they were young. This is because threat assessment is a function of how safe one feels, and safety is oriented and wired in the brain between birth and 3 years old. Do you know your own attachment story? If not, it may help you to read about the different attachment types, and do some research into how that might be impacting you as an adult. There are four types: Anxious, Avoidant, Disorganized and Secure. The goal is not to label or judge you or your past, the goal is to better position you to reclaim projections so that you can have more success and flexibility in situations that normally provoke reflexive responses in you.
You will be less likely to resist other people if you do not perceive them as a threat, and the threat assessment your body does is hardwired through attachment.
In addition to attachment work, you can do Shadow Work which is the practice of exploring the unconscious parts of your identity. The purpose of Shadow Work is to make more parts of yourself conscious and integrated instead of unconscious and repressed. If you want more information about this, please feel free to reach out. We do some basic Shadow Work at the Santa Fe Seminar, but most people need to go a bit deeper to see results that show up more permanently.
Outer Work: Outer work without inner work is not a good idea, but regardless, you can take action in the outer world that will help you break this pattern. Here are some things to try:
When you ask for feedback on your work, respond only by saying “thank you”. This will only work if you hold it as an unbreakable rule. Even if you honor this, people will still perceive defensiveness or resistance even if you don’t say anything, so this strategy is best used in conjunction with inner work to ensure you are addressing the internal feelings of threat, but it is also a great place to start. What this looks like in practice is people will give you feedback that you want to respond to, and you have to hold back. This will feel hard and unnatural. It will mean letting misperceptions go unchecked or unexplained. You can help this by saying ahead of time that you will just say “thank you” so that you can think about the feedback before responding. By framing this as about the container and not a random choice, it helps people understand the change. It may even spark some curiosity in them as they wonder why you are experimenting or doing something different.
Structure and Plan Resistance in a Meeting Agenda: By claiming and structuring a place where resistance is the goal, it changes the dynamic of how it feels. It also prompts us to schedule this feedback in a place where we can then use it to improve our work. If you roll out a solution that needs to be implemented tomorrow, people will make the assumption you don't want their help because you haven't given yourself enough time to use their help.
When you hear yourself label someone or a group resistant, stop, pause and ask: What am I resisting that is leading me to label them as resistant. Once you identify what you are resisting, investigate whatever it is with the person who you labeled. You could try something like this as a conversation started: “The other day you said, “_____________” (Try and use a direct quote), and I noticed that I felt resistance in me. This is usually a sign that I need to learn more about what you said, and I am wondering if you can say a bit more about __________ (insert what you were resistant to hearing).
If you are feeling brave, you can check out the work of Jia Jiang around rejection. He gave a great TEDTalk in 2016, and he created the website RejectionTherapy.com and he went on to write a book called Rejection Proof. His whole goal was to get rejected on purpose to see what he could learn. He took this work beyond what I am suggesting, but his work is adaptable and accessible to all individuals and groups that are interested in this topic.
Systems Work: If inner work is about you, and outer work is about the way you work, systems work is investigating culture or systems in your school that contribute to this dynamic playing out reflexively and unconsciously. Here are some things you can do systemically to investigate how people experience resistance in a system:
Using the EcoCycle, a tool created by Liberating Structures, you can map the programs, ideas or really anything you are working on in a school, and you can pay particular attention to the poverty trap and rigidity trap sections of this exercise. Are there patterns in your school in regards to people, ideas, or programs that get stuck in these two traps. One trap is a lack of investment, and one trap is filled with things that schools cannot let go of, and in either case, looking for systemic patterns can help you understand things that may be affecting you at a systems level.
Leadership Team Discussion: Do we have a culture of learning or a culture of performance in our school? In a culture of learning, pushback is food for innovation and learning. In a culture of performance, pushback is critique and to be thwarted. In a culture of performance, the culture wants your identity attached to your work as a way to control and push for compliance when things get too divergent. In a culture of learning, we want to embrace the messiness of adaptive work and co-create solutions with people who see the world completely differently. If you need help with this conversation, let us know, we are happy to help.
As you consider your own experience, try and be soft and don’t judge yourself. We are all prone to attaching our work to our identity, and we all know the feeling of having something we worked hard on seen as bad or wrong. For some of us, this is a momentary feeling that is easy to shake and for others, it is a debilitating and even trauma inducing reminder of the dangers of the world. You cannot see someone’s past history of trauma or safety in their outward appearance.
If you are a leader, it is your responsibility to do the inner work you need to avoid blaming others for things that live in you. Resistance is always internal and never happening to you. Feel free to reach out if you need support with this or want to discuss further.
