When those around you block change, they sometimes do it right in your face. As most people shy away from open conflict, they resist quietly. Hence it takes you a little longer to realise that they are “in the way”. And at that moment when you realise that they obstruct the change, you feel threatened.
It’s like your house is on fire
Depending on your reactive tendencies, you will get angry at them, or you’ll be anxious that you will fail as a change leader. That you will fail as a leader.
This is the moment where you want to react: argue, justify, persuade, and coerce, or isolate and create a camp of supporters.
How to prepare to stay present in that moment
This is the moment for which you have to build your muscle of recovering from your reactive to your creative Self, which means to bounce back to your calm and peaceful mind, the mind that will find a constructive way forward.
There are many ways of building that muscle and of restoring your energy. To name but a few that I regularly engage in:
At the core of these approaches lies an exploration of what deeply motivates you to do the work you do, and an exploration of how you tend to get in your own way.
You need to increase your inner complexity in order to be able to thrive in the complexity of the outer world.
Knowing yourself better enables you to be a better change leader.
Understanding your own complexity and befriending your own resistance to change helps you find empathy for and the ability to help others get through their resistance.
Seeing what’s going on around you without being drawn into the drama, you can work with the resistance rather than trying to push through it.
