If you want to understand resistance, begin with a simple demonstration. Put your hands together in front of you and push them together. As one is pushing, the other is resisting. Notice what happens in your shoulders, your back, your neck and your jaw as you resist or meet resistance. It’s obvious that resistance breeds tension and tension spreads. The more effort you put into meeting resistance, the more tension you experience in what started out as completely unrelated areas.
Now try the demonstration a different way. As soon as one hand begins to push against the other, drop the second hand into your lap. Instead of tension, you will experience confusion. That’s not the way the game is supposed to be played. To decide what happens next, you would have to know the intention behind the resistance. What you can see immediately is that resistance normally breeds tension and if you refuse to participate in the resistance, you create an opening for change.
The work of Milton Erickson demonstrates how much change can be accomplished if the change agent refuses to meet resistance head on. Whether we look at pattern interrupts like the one above or at Erickson’s use of language and metaphor, what we see is change practitioner working around resistance instead of meeting it head on. While it may be possible to overcome resistance and bully someone into a new behaviour, there are more elegant, more effective and more satisfying strategies.
The key to employing these strategies is to remain relaxed and committed to your goal when you run into resistance. It’s harder than it sounds. Resistance tends to take us by surprise and in that moment of surprise, we are likely to meet resistance with resistance. It takes an act of will to incorporate the resistance into our strategy so that we will simply meet our goal by another route. The key is to know what we want so clearly that we will remember our goal when we hit resistance. Instead of hitting back, we simply notice the resistance and move around it.
So begin with knowing what you want. Resistance to change that you haven’t envisioned clearly and to which you are not entirely committed is not really resistance: it’s a call to find out what you can imagine, what is worth your commitment. Spend time mentally rehearsing for success, so that you are motivated and made resourceful just by thinking about this goal. Imagine the state in which you want to move toward your goal and the relationships you want to have at the end. This keeps you primed for opportunities to move the way you want towards what you want.
When you are clear about the rewards for staying committed to your goal, then consider your ability to influence yourself. Practice moving from tension to relaxed focus. Practice returning to your thoughts and your chosen state after many different interruptions. It’s nice to be balanced and relaxed. It’s better to know how to get back to balance after being surprised, interrupted, or run over by a small bulldozer. So welcome interruptions and distractions as opportunities to practice managing yourself so that you are satisfied with your results and satisfied with who you are as your pursue them.
Finally, think about times when the shoe was on the other foot and you were the person doing the resisting. If you can connect to times when you resisted, it will be much easier for you to see the resources that are masked by someone else’s resistance to you. Every behaviour that requires repetition and effort (that includes any serious resistance) is driven by a benefit. The person who is resisting you is gaining something from that resistance. Knowing what it is gives you an opportunity to move them towards similar benefits in a more direct way. It may even allow you to improve your original goal with new information.
When you are clear on what you want as a result and in the relationship, when you know how to get your own balance back when you have been interrupted or distracted, and when you know that resistance holds new information and useful gifts, then you are ready to encounter resistance and find your way around it. There is no progress in two people blocking each other’s paths. There can be accelerated progress and great satisfaction in looking around the path you are on and finding new ways to get where you want to go. Working around the resistance is a great way to discover those new paths to successful change.