Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 65: Why am I resisting?

August 10, 2021 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 65: Why am I resisting?
Show Notes Transcript

"Typically, the thing we don't want to keep doing – the thing we'd like to change – is very much tied to a thing that's very useful to us. In fact, it can be exactly the same skill, but showing up in a different framework."

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Why am I resisting?"

Paul:

So in my work as a coach, I often work with individuals or with teams that want to make some kind of change. They say,"Hey, there's this thing that maybe I've gotten some feedback about, and I really agree with it, and I really want to do something different, here's what I want to be doing." And, inevitably, what happens is, the change doesn't happen. Even though they want it to. Even thoughthey say, like, I've tried these things, and, maybe, and just nothing's landing. It's not working. And one of the things we wanted to dig into a little bit here is where some of these sources of internal and often unintentional and very often unconscious resistance to a change that we say that we want comes from. Because they come from a variety of different places. Often we don't have the space to step back and see what's happening and notice what's really going on to be able to pinpoint those sorts of things. So that's what we'd like to explore, both at the individual and at the group level: How we get in the way of the change that we say that we want.

Karen:

Yeah, I think the place I want to start with this is, well, part of why we're resisting is because we're clever. There are good reasons to be resisting. The way I like to think about that is, if you're in a job, in a team, you're reasonably successful person, most of what you do is actually working really well. So overall, in life, in our evolutionary history, to continue in the pattern that we've been in is pretty safe. It got us this far. We haven't died yet. We've had some professional success. We tend to, in the new corporate culture, be thinking about, "Well, change is good, so why wouldn't we want to?" But in fact, if you went and changed absolutely everything about you, no one on your team would thank you. Most of you needs to stay the same from day to day to day. So I do think we have an internal, probably biological tendency to keep doing the thing that we've always done before. Because even if it didn't get us the results we wanted, even if we got into some painful situations around it, the reality is at the end of the day, we survived. We kept our job. We made the thing work. So something about it is working, or we wouldn't keep doing it. And it's wise of us to notice that and not just say, "Oh, well, that's a terrible thing, I'll throw it out." But maybe we want to keep it or maybe we want to keep part of it. So the very first step for me about why am I resisting is, well, maybe because you should be

Paul:

Edgar Schein has one of my favorite definitions of organizational culture ever, where he actually talks about how culture is the often unconscious set of lessons learned by an organization that have enabled it to survive to this point, and that people regard as valid enough to pass on to the future. Right. And so it's these things have worked well enough up until now that we come to just take them for granted. That happens at the individual level; it happens at the group level as well. We've made these deep wagon wheel ruts of patterns of behavior. We've got these neural pathways that are strongly reinforced, because they've worked. They've gotten us to here. And one of the challenges, actually, when I work with individuals and groups, right is "Yes, they've gotten you here, and you can also see that they're not going to get you to where you want to go next." And that's where the intent to change comes from. But that doesn't change the reality of habits and just years of behaving in these sorts of ways. And you're right, we don't want to just throw them out. There are times when we do still want to continue to do those things. So I think one of the places where we get stuck when we resist change, where we say,"Hey, I want to start giving more candid feedback," for example. If we take that as an example, because I actually work with leaders a lot who says like, "I know that I don't give people feedback enough, and I want to do that." And then we have a coaching session and I'm, like, "So how many pieces of feedback have you given in the last two weeks?" They're like,"One." And the goal was like, 20, or whatever it was. So, so you start to dig into it, you're like, "So what's getting in the way of that?" And what we find is that there are these sort of unconscious assumptions that are under doing anything different than what we already have. And so they'll often dig into this place of like, "Well, I don't want to hurt people's feelings. I know that I'm not good at this, and so it's gonna be kind of harsh." And I'm like, "Cool. So you have understood that not hurting people's feelings has been useful to you in a lot of situations." And they're like,"Yeah, absolutely. "Cool," I'm like, "Alright, so that's an additional thing that we have to start to overcome." It's not just changing the behavior. It's recognizing what else do you have that the new behavior would contradict? And, and inevitably, when we start to have the conversation about that, I was like, "Imagine giving people 20 pieces of feedback, really candidly, over the course of a week. What would that be like? And then you just see the blood drained out of their face. There's a fear under that. And until they can confront that and work with it, and recognize,"Oh, I have this deeply held assumption that giving people feedback is going to cause them not to like me that I need to challenge until they can work around that there's no way they're gonna start giving people feedback.

Karen:

I think one of the things that makes that even trickier, is that typically the thing we don't want to keep doing the thing we'd like to change is very much tied to a thing that's very useful to us. In fact, it can be exactly the same skill, but showing up in a different framework. So if somebody has gotten to a leadership position, I'm betting they have given feedback. And then it's been very useful feedback in various ways at different times. And however that landed, that they're fearful of a certain type of feedback, but the same thing of that would have been useful. So it certainly in my wanderings with this sort of thing, I can have a tendency to be judgmental, and that's not good. And I would like it to go away. So I want to just turn off the judgment. But it turns out that same skill that is judgment is also discernment. And it's also the ability to weigh and value and figure out what works and what doesn't. That's all the same skill set. And so as I say,"Well, I want to be less judgmental." What does that actually mean? And what is the context within it? Because if I just tried to cut that out, then I lose one of the things that I'm really valued for. And so that conflict is part of the the fear piece of, "Okay, I've been beaten up for this. I've also been rewarded for the same skill set in a different context." So how do we sort through that?

Paul:

I once had a 360 evaluation in an organization, where on one page was, "What are all the things that Paul does really well?" And on the next page was, "What are the things that Paul could be more skillful about? Or that Paul isn't very good at?" And if you read across the page, they were exactly the same things in different contexts. And it's exactly that. It that oftentimes, our weaknesses are our strengths misapplied. Applied in the wrong situation in a slightly different way. And so one of the things that again furthers that resistance is we also have a tendency to feel like the thing is binary. We either do it or we don't. If we only ever have one tool, then we feel like we either have to use it or not. And oftentimes, when we're really good at it when we've done it a ton we don't see that we have alternatives. And so one of things I often work with people on is, what might you do, instead of this thing, that is an alternative way of getting to the same result?. Because when we start to recognize we have choices it's not just do the thing or not it's like, "Well, I might do it the way I've always done it, I might do it in this particular way, I might make this change to it, or I might do this other thing instead," that shifting out of the either-or thinking actually frees us up. It gives us a greater sense of choice and autonomy, and more of a sense of control that I find often dissolves some of that resistance. Virginia Satir, who I've learned a ton from once said one choice is not a choice at all. One choice is a trap. Two choices is a dilemma. Three is where real options begin. And so part of it is if we're in the trap or dilemma, that means we'd kind of just need to do a little bit more thinking about what are other options that we have. And when we're in a trap or a dilemma, I can totally understand why we would resist change and why we continue to do the thing we've always been doing.

Karen:

I think a particularly useful framework for that might be looking at to take your example of leaders who struggle to get candid feedback because they don't want people to get their feelings hurt perhaps they need to learn some skills around how to give useful feedback. If the instinct is to say, "Yeah, I didn't like the way you did that, it really seemed like you didn't apply yourself." That might not be the language that you know that that language is getting people's feelings hurt. They might want to learn a different approach of being clear about the content or having some other plan, but there are plenty of structures out there for that. So if they can sort of learn and practice that that sort of thing. But I think the often the thing that stops us is what we've done it and it's gone badly. So if we want to give ourselves more choices, it may be the way we get more choices is by getting some training or some experience with different strategies towards that same goal or different skills. It might not just be strategies. It can absolutely be skills. I'm not good at it, because I do it badly. And let me go learn how that's done well.

Paul:

Yeah. And I think a piece that's kind of under that is also these baked-in assumptions that we have often because we pick them up early in our lives or early in our careers, about how these things go. Conflict is another great example of this. I know you and I both do a lot of work with groups around being in conflict. People have huge assumptions about what conflict means and what a conflict is often rooted in their prior experiences. As long as those assumptions remain unexamined, then it becomes really difficult to change your behaviors around them. It becomes really hard. So if, for example, you assume that all unchecked conflict will dissolve into name-calling and personal attacks because that's been the majority of your early experiences with conflict then, of course, what you're going to do is silence dissent as soon as it starts to pop up. And until you can actually have some experiences that expose and call into question your assumption that all conflict will dissolve into personal name-calling and attacks, your behavior is gonna just continue to reinforce what you've been doing. Because you're never gonna get any good counter-examples. So I think oftentimes, it's useful to figure out, what's the assumption that is underlying the current behavior, and how might I start to question that assumption? How might I start to have some experiences that explicitly contradict it? Or confirm it? Because the other thing is that it might be true. It might be real. But so I think that we often will focus in resistance to change we'll focus on behavior. But I think it's really useful to start to look at what are the unconscious assumptions that are under that behavior, that as long as those remain intact, the behavior is going to continue to be reinforced?

Karen:

So I think, overall, on this question of, why am I resisting? First, maybe, because it's a smart thing, and you should be, and also just sort of that normal tendency to continue and just recognizing that that's actually a thing. And then being willing to look into self and really understand where is this coming from? How might it be tied to the good things that I do? And how might those kinds o strengths and the weaknesses be very linked? And then we've un acked that. Let's look at the c ntext within which it's h ppening. Expand the choices. G t rid of the binary assumption a d start looking for what are t e other ways? What are the s ills I might add to this? Or w at are the other approaches t at I might know how to do? And t en really taking a look at what re the things that I want to hange? What are the underlying ssumptions that may be feeding hose things, and is there's omething there that I want to ook at changing as well.

Paul:

The thing that I'll tag on at the end, which is rea ly the whole frame around thi is, this is super normal, sup r common. We both have a lot of mpathy for people who are try ng to do this kind of work and try to go through this cha ge. It's hard. And so having som self-compassion around the fac that you're having dif iculty with this even when y u say that you want to get b tter at a thing, finding y urself not doing it, the b ating yourself up around it is a tually just a way of p rpetuating the existing b havior of avoiding the change. R cognizing and acknowledging t e difficulty you're having; hat that doesn't mean you're a ad person; that that's actuall a super normal thing that lo s of people go through around t, and that's really hard; t at is also an important piece o overcoming that sort of interna ized resistance to change.

Karen:

I think that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences