This begins a new blog series called FLEX Coaches Corner. I have just started Adopting FLEX online. Each lesson has a ‘coaches corner’ where I present coaching tips for participants. Each week I’ll put one of these out on Net Objectives Thoughts and collect them as Coaches Clinic.
We are told people always resist it, but this is an over-simplification. Consider this excerpt from A Simpler Way. Margaret Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Resistance is not to change
In practice, all systems do insist on exercising their own creativity. They never accept imposed solutions, predetermined designs, or well-articulated plans that have been generated somewhere else
Too often, we interpret their refusal as resistance. We say that people innately resist change
But the resistance we experience from others is not to change itself. It is to the particular process of change that believes in imposition rather than creation. It is the resistance of a living system to being treated as a non-living thing
It is an assertion of the system’s right to create. It is life insisting on its primary responsibility to create itself
Moment of Reflection
I’m not suggesting that all resistance is to imposed change. Sometimes people are comfortable and don’t want change. But it is important to note that many times resistance is due more to the imposition than the change itself. When people can see that something will help them, they often don’t resist
Consider a time when a change was made that people didn’t resist. Why do you think that was?