INsight/ Resistance to Advice

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Manila, 23 September 2020 — Three forms of resistance to transform.

As you know from Newton’s third law of motion, any action will produce a reaction. As a leader, when you take an action to challenge the status quo and drive a change in your current situation, there is bound to be some reaction. It’s only natural for that to happen.

Oftentimes, that reaction comes in the form of resistance to the very change you want to create. And since that mostly happens in the minds of the people you want to influence, it’s not always obvious what is happening, contrary to Newton’s experiments with the physics of moving objects.

In my coaching work, I found that resistance to change can come in three forms. 

Resistance to Being Told

First, resistance can arise in you when someone tells you what you should do, or what you cannot do. I know this well from my own experience. Let me use the Work In All Colors method (with seven colors indicating seven different worldviews) to illustrate what I mean. 

When someone gives me an order or instruction (BLUE) that I don’t see or understand the need for, a resistance in me is easily triggered. Then we’re getting further away from a positive result.

On the other hand, if someone would pose the same course of action as a challenge to take on (ORANGE), a social thing to do (GREEN), or as experimenting with a new solution (YELLOW), I’m game to do it.

Just like I can be triggered by BLUE, you will have resistance to one or more colors (Worldviews) too. It’s natural.

As executive and coach, I have learned how important it is that you speak the right (color) language to the people you want to influence. Nelson Mandela referred to this practice as learning to speak their language. It’s an essential skill for leaders.

If you don’t choose the right color to speak in, or you haven’t learned yet how to speak the language of that color effectively, you might trigger unnecessary resistance in your audience. And that sets everyone back.

Resistance to Your Advice

Second, resistance can be triggered when your default way of speaking involves giving advice. Of course, I am sure your advice is well-intentioned. Yet it is still advice. Several things can happen next.

At best, your audience will accept your advice and take action just like you recommended. As the story goes, they may ‘accept your fish’ but they might not have worked out how to catch fish themselves.

So you’re leaving them in the status quo without capacitating them. Although resistance may seem low, you haven’t created a significant and lasting change either, and inertia may result.

At worst, they might not take your advice and even ask you to leave, or vote with their own feet to leave (or stay and get busy on their phone). You wasted your time and they wasted theirs. Resistance emerged and grew.

According to Michael Bungay Stanier, a coach, we all have an Advice Monster living inside us. You need to tame it.

From my experience, the situations where giving advice (Telling) is your best course of action are actually few and far between. Often, your best bet is to listen first to understand where your audience is at. Then it’s easier to choose the action — and the language to use — that will work best there.

In many situations, using questions to coach or facilitate the next action will be more effective than advising them what to do. With your support, your audience will then find a solution that makes sense for them and the situation, and they develop ownership and take action. Everyone wins.

Resistance to Change in You

Third, there is a more insidious form of resistance that you can encounter. It’s when you experience a mysterious resistance inside yourself to a change that you want to make. 

This usually happens subconsciously in what we call a blindspot. When you tell yourself to take on a new challenge that calls for a change in what you work on, or how you do that task, this can trigger resistance in you.

Often, this resistance shows up when you procrastinate on the execution of the change, which in turn makes you feel troubled. Most of us can point to an example. I certainly can. 

Just last week, a fellow coach led me through a 5-step process in 90 minutes to transform a resistance that I struggled with, about the book that I’m writing. She got me ‘on the balcony’ to see what was really happening. 

That’s what coaches do. And it’s why my leadership practice is called TransformationFirst.Asia. Because going for a deeper change always starts with a transformation. For you, for me, for everyone.

If you have detected this third form of resistance in yourself, or one of the other two, and you want to transform it into positive results, let me know. That’s where coaching is helpful, as I was reminded myself last week. Coaches benefit from coaching too!

In the #Grow3Leaders community, we work as leaders on making our communication more effective, using worldviews in the languages we choose to speak, and recognizing and dealing with resistance in ourselves and in others.

Thanks to Isaac Newton for making us aware that reaction is a natural response to action. Resistance will happen when you drive change. Let’s work on smartly transforming it for better outcomes.