Being resistant to change is not a bad thing. Not that you would know this in some professional psychological circles. Being change resistant is often used as a subtle insult to people who are not conforming with the objectives of therapeutic interventions, often because those same interventions are ineffective, badly delivered or just plain rubbish.

In other contexts resistance is called resilience. Usually when someone wants you to change and you don’t want to they describe you as resistant and that is not, in that context , a compliment! When you are resisting changing and everyone approves (such as resisting say not going back on the booze) then you get congratulated on your ability to resist! Context is everything in human behaviour and it helps no one to make something good or bad.

This ought to be a specific professional best practice in coaching and other therapies but many times practitioners let judgement sneak into their response to their clients resistances.

In coaching resistance is treated, by the coach, as a neutral, neither good nor bad. What we are aiming for is that the client to get a good understanding of how their capacity to resist is being used, by them, n what ways and to what end.

Resistance is driven by emotions, from fear at one end to joy at the other. People don’t want to do things because they are scared ( frightened ) of what the consequences will be. Change is often framed or perceived as a threat in some way. That threat may be a specific consequence that can be defined clearly or it may be for instance a fear of the unfamiliar or unknown. Fear will cause us to resist in some way unless we are overcome by circumstances or another person or group.

From another perspective when we really feel something or someone is important we can become unbelievably resistant to anything that deviates from our support for that something or person. When we become engaged in a meaning based activity that calls out from us our highest values then we can become very intentional, dedicated and committed, in other words hard to put off our stride. 

The problem we have in behavioural health is that we have applied resistance to change to our inability to deal effectively on an individual basis with such problems as giving up addictive or dependent behaviours ( such as eating too much, eating junk food, drinking, taking drugs, working too hard, living in stress and so on ). These kinds of issues are tough to change for a number of reasons the main one being that they are resilient to change.

People judge themselves for being resistant to change. For example when you hear people use the words ‘I know I ought to……but I can’t or I find it difficult’ then you can be sure that somewhere in there they are judging themselves as being wrong for being resistant to change. What coaches can help them do is understand that being resistant to change is an asset that they can use and redeploy to help them navigate, and where necessary, change their lives.

Here are some tips for coaches to use around this topic in their coaching practice:

1. Help you client explore their lives and find specific places in their lives where they are highly resistant to change and places where they change easily and quickly.

2. Work with them to identify what emotions are related to these different levels of resistance to change and how those emotions supply energy for change or resistance to change.

3. Work with your clients to understand their emotions, where they arise from and how they can reconfigure them to change the energy available to the change process.

4. Work with your clients to help them develop a neutral (non judgemental) attitude to both easy change and resistance change. The goal here is to get clear about resistance to change itself across all parts of life, not be judge and jury on it.

5. Assist your client to not get caught up in fear and anxiety driven change over the medium to long term.

6. People forget that timing matters much more than anyone recognises. Just because something has been identified as being something that it would be desirable to change does not mean that it has to be changed or indeed even can be changed…...yet.

A last word on fear as a catalyst for change. It is useful and a powerful agent for change…….but know that for many people its usefulness wears off. We humans are not evolved to be fearful all the time. Being fearful all the time is called ongoing unhealthy stress. So change built on fear is temporary and likely to revert unless it is replaced with other motivating energy.

Often people get stuck in a double bind of fear. They fear what will happen to them if they don’t change and fear what will happen to them if they do! In these cases the door out of the dilemma is to engage with meaning which contains the positive emotions associated with fulfillment ( joy, excitement, wonder, love etc)

We coaches, as I am always saying, are not immune to things that trip up people generally. I recognise that in some ways that my personal ability to resist change has both served me well in some ways and tripped me up in others.

This can manifest in our coaching practice where we get comfortable with certain coaching behaviours, skills and techniques and find we are losing our edge and effectiveness as coaches. This points us to a common universal dilema. Life IS change and whether we resist specific things or not does not take away from this central truth. We can hardly be certain of anything in the future except of course that we will all pass away at some point. In between now and then change will happen and our resistance to it or acceptance and flowing with it will be our only two options. We will opt for one or the other as we go along, hopefully using some wisdom and insight to release our best lives along the way.