The Different Faces of Resistance

December 2019

“I’M STILL LEARNING.” ~MICHELANGELO

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Learning from Suzanne

A new grandmother’s reflections on learning

Mashed Potato Moments

At six months old, Suzanne is learning to eat with a spoon. She is also learning about flavors. She’s experienced apples, pears, and bananas of course. Most recently, she sampled zucchini and avocado. Every time Suzanne tastes a new food her mouth puckers slightly. Then she quivers for a split second as if saying, “What is this?” Finally, she relaxes into the sensation and the experience.

Our family has been anxiously awaiting Thanksgiving this year, not just for the traditional holiday fun, but because we knew this year’s Thanksgiving would mark Suzanne’s first taste of mashed potatoes. This first experience is something of a family ritual. Decades ago, Suzanne’s grandfather introduced Suzanne’s mother and her uncle to mashed potatoes at this same time of year. Those occasions have become part of our oral history, stories we tell and retell when we’re together.

As we settled at the table, we silently prepared for what we knew would be the pinnacle moment of our Thanksgiving celebration. Our cameras were ready. The adults filled their plates and Suzanne was passed to Grandpa who filled the infant spoon with a healthy quantity of mashed potatoes and just a bit of gravy.

Renowned psychology researcher Barbara Fredriksson names joy as one of ten important positive emotions that, when experienced regularly, can help individuals, partnerships, and teams thrive in life. Dr. Fredrickson describes joy in this way:

Joy feels bright and light. Colors seem more vivid. There’s a spring in your step. And your face lights up with a smile and an inner glow. You feel like taking it all in. You feel playful – you want to jump in and get involved. (Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the Upward Spiral that will Change Your Life, p. 41)

It is no exaggeration that Suzanne experienced tremendous joy in that first bite of mashed potatoes and the many spoonfuls that came afterwards. And interestingly enough, every adult around the table also experienced joy as we witnessed this event and marveled at Suzanne’s delight in this experience.

My take-aways from this simple but joyous event:

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Unlocking the Learning when faced with Resistance

Part II: Strategies for Addressing Resistance through Coaching

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers. Fred Rogers

The Different Faces of Resistance

Why do people sometimes resist new ideas and change? When we come across resistance, it’s important to take time to consider the reasons it is occurring. The act of working to understand the resister’s perspective is sometimes enough to melt resistance and start a dialogue about the steps and supports needed so that the resister can walk forward into change.

Fear

Resistance is very often a cover for fear, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of being judged. A stance of resistance, in fact, is a physiologically based reaction to the emotion of fear. In our brains, the amygdala is the region responsible for processing emotions and responding to fear. When an individual perceives an event to be physically or socially threatening, the amygdala instantly releases the hormone cortisol which triggers a fight, flight, or freeze response. This phenomenon, called an amygdala hijack, can appear as active or passive resistance.

When a coaching relationship is present, a feeling of safety exists for the coachee which calms the amygdala by releasing a different hormone, oxytocin. As a result, rational thought and learning are again possible (Hammond, 2015; Powell & Kusama-Powell, 2013). A coaching relationship, therefore, keeps the amygdala in check, allowing the coachee to maintain a learning mindset.

Conflicting Mental Frames

Sometimes resistance is activated when the other person sees the situation from a mental frame different than yours. Perhaps the two of you have contrasting values related to the issue or use different sets of criteria to make decisions.

• A school leader believes that social-emotional learning is the foundation of student success, but a teacher believes that school is and should be all about academics.
• A teacher defines mathematical proficiency as skill with computation, but the coach sees mathematics as all about critical thinking and problem solving.
• A student struggles with learning and comes to doubt his abilities. He feels insecure taking academic risks and therefore disengages cognitively. The teacher doesn’t appear to see his distress; the student concludes that she doesn’t care about him as a person. As a result of his perceptions and the narrative he’s built around these perceptions, the student sees little point in trying to learn. The teacher, unaware of her student’s inner turmoil, interprets his withdrawal as a lack of motivation and a lack of respect for her and the effort she is making to help him.

Organizational behavior expert Margaret Wheatly tells us that when others resist our ideas, we tend to immediately frame their resistance as stupidity. She says:

Any work, proposal or idea that comes from a different worldview, that is based on a new way of thinking, creates lots of “stupid” people. It’s not that they can’t reason, think or apply logic. It’s that they have no framework for understanding anything based on different beliefs and assumptions, different logic. When people look at new ideas through their familiar lens, all they see is a haze of disconnected statements and ideas. And it’s not about helping them connect the dots – we’re presenting ideas that, to them, don’t even look like dots. (2010, p. 83)

Wheatly says that the remedy for this situation is patience and compassion. She advises, “Let’s redefine our task and challenge ourselves to become gentle guides to the world as we see it, not fierce advocates for our view of reality.”

When we suspect that conflicting mind frames may be behind resistance, we need to invest time examining the values represented by our personal mind frames and the mind frames held by others. We can use coaching questions such as these to support others in surfacing their mind frames and underlying values:

• What might your inner dialogue about ___ sound like?
• As you evaluate this issue, what are some things that make this situation important to you?
• What experiences/values do you suspect have shaped your beliefs about this topic?
• Once we understand each other’s perspectives on an issue, we can often find common ground and a path forward.

Scarcity vs. Abundance Mindsets

According to leadership guru John Maxwell (2015), people tend to view life with either a scarcity mindset or an abundance mindset. People with a scarcity mindset believe that the good things in life are limited in supply, that we are in competition with each other for recognition, rewards, even happiness. People with an abundance mindset, on the other hand, believe these gifts exist in endless supply and that our role in life is to help each other grow our internal resources and succeed in reaching our goals. In fact, people with an abundance lens on life believe that the more we help each other, the more others reciprocate, thus causing everyone to benefit.

When individuals hold opposing lenses related to scarcity and abundance, resistance is often the result because: 1) it is difficult to understand the other person’s point of view, and 2) the contrasting view threatens one’s underlying value system. These two contrasting theories about how life works trigger different emotions (jealousy or celebration), different types of behaviors (self-protection or generosity), and result in different consequences for individuals and organizations.

What is your current theory of life? How might you test it to see if it holds water? Next time something good happens to someone else, perhaps an opportunity you were hoping for, how might you intentionally set aside a feeling of envy and instead choose a genuine feeling of joy? What happens internally and externally when you choose to replace a scarcity mindset with an abundance mindset?

How do you see these theories at work in students’ words and actions? How might you help students examine and test their personal theories about how life works? How could greater self-awareness of their internal life theories benefit a class community and school culture? How might it improve students’ lives?

Is it resistance or learned helplessness?

What sometimes looks like resistance can in fact be something else entirely. When experiences and environments have convinced individuals they are incapable of learning, they stop trying. This effect, called learned helplessness, can be seen in test animals (Seligman, 2018) and with students who have a history of learning struggle. It can be a barrier to teacher learning as well. The teacher who has come to rely on a curriculum resource with scripted lessons feels ill-equipped to design her own lessons or curriculum when standards and programs change. Rather than digging into acquiring the new understandings and skills she now needs, she shuts down. What appears to be resistance is actually a lack of teacher efficacy. For more about coaching to overcome learned helplessness, see section xx.

Steps toward Unlocking Resistance

Counterintuitively, the key to defusing resistance lies in choosing not to label others as resistant. When we decide someone is resistant to an idea or learning, we make a judgement about that person. We say, in essence, that our idea or opinion is better than theirs and that they don’t have the right or the need to make personal sense of the situation and how to respond to it.

We must also be cautious of falling into the trap of thinking that the way to disarm resistance is by playing detective and puzzling out the other person’s motivations and fears so we can manipulate them into agreeing with us. This again positions us as more important than the other person and, at least in our mind, takes away this person’s right to make sense of the world. Instead, we need to acknowledge his or her view and value the person as a worthy human being and a sense maker.

When we respect each person’s right to make personal sense of their world, we honor people as learners and position ourselves to support them as thinkers and problem solvers.

Here are the steps we need to take in response to resistance.

1. Look inward. Begin by examining your own beliefs and assumptions related to the issue. If the resistance you are facing has triggered your own locked or judgmental mindset, choose to shift into a stance of curiosity.
2. Accept the other person as human and therefore worthy of respect. Then mentally try to step inside the other person’s resistance, to understand its source and underlying values. Work together, if possible, to appreciate each other’s perspectives and find common ground.
3. identify the support the other person may want or need to begin considering a new perspective on the issue and/or to begin making changes. Remind yourself that this is a learning journey for both of you which will require ongoing engagement and reflection.

Strategies for Addressing Resistance through Coaching

• We’re in this Together! In some cases, the most effective way to thaw resistance is to establish a learning partnership with the coachee, a space where he feels empowered as an agent in his own learning rather than as someone who needs to be fixed. You are, in essence, sharing power with the coachee and helping this individual to see you as an ally rather than adversary. The door to inviting a learning partnership can often be opened with the question “What support might you need to move forward with this initiative?” After establishing this learning alliance, it is helpful to outline a partnership agreement either verbally or on paper as a way of validating the alliance and spelling out each person’s responsibilities and any timelines. It is important to affirm the coachee as the driver in his or her learning journey and your role in providing support and feedback.

• If you knew you would succeed, what would you do? Sometimes what we need to get past our own resistance and to help others move beyond resistance is a simple spark of imagination. The question “If you knew you would succeed, what would you do?”  mentally sweeps away perceived barriers (Berger, 2016). When I work with students on math problem solving and they reach a point of stuckness in their thinking, I often pose the question “If you knew you were going to figure out the answer to this problem, what might you try first?” Perhaps the coaching questions “If ___ was not an issue, what might you try?” could be just that catalyst needed to ignite possibility thinking and help an individual move past resistance into action.

• Triangulate the Data Data triangulation is a process used by researchers to add credibility to their conclusions. It means, simply, that evidence is collected from three different sources. As you help others consider their reasons for opposing a change, you might nudge them to examine their assumptions from multiple perspectives. In fact, it’s good for all of us to get in the habit of triangulating data before reaching conclusions on important matters. Here are some questions to use or adapt:
  • Think of three people who might have varying perspectives on this change. How might they each explain their position? What truth might exist in each of these perspectives?
  • If you were in favor of this change, what three reasons might you give for advocating for it? How do these benefits balance with any drawbacks? How might you reconcile these advantages and disadvantages? How might you move forward with this change and still maintain your integrity?

• Stepping into Fear If we acknowledge that resistance is often fear-based, it can be helpful to explore the presence of fear in learning situations and think together about ways we can manage fear. This strategy supports teachers in looking at their own fear after they first consider the possible presence and impact of fear in their students’ learning. Here are some questions to guide a team dialogue or coaching conversation:
  • What might some of your students be fearful of in school? What might they fear in learning? What might be behind these fears?
  • What are some ways teachers can help students learn to step into their fear, to become academic risk-takers? What supports might students need when they encounter productive struggle in order to persevere?
  • How do these ideas connect with your own fears about professional growth and learning? What might you need to be a courageous and resilient professional learner?

• Testing Your Life Theory Introduce the ideas of scarcity and abundance mindsets to your team or faculty. Which mindset do they most identify with? Together, identify several concrete steps you will each take over the next week to contribute to a school culture defined by abundance and generosity. Agree to come back together in a week and report out about the results of this experiment.

Questions for Reflection or Discussion:

• How might you experiment with these ideas about resistance in the context of your work or your personal life?
• Who do you know that might benefit from thinking about resistance from a new perspective? How might you share some ideas with this person?
• Why should educators concern themselves with resistance? What is the relationship between resistance and learning?

For more ideas about addressing resistance, see Examining Your Mindset Toward Resistance in last month’s newsletter.

References:

Berger, W. (2016). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hammond, Z. ( 2015). Culturally responsive teaching & the brain. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin

Maxwell, J. (2015)

John C. Maxwell: 6 Tips to Develop and Model an Abundance Mindset

Powell, W., & Kusama-Powell, O. (2013). Becoming and emotionally intelligent teacher. New York: First Skyhorse Publishing.

Seligman, M. (2018). The hope circuit: A psychologist’s journey from helplessness to optimism. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Wheatley, M. (2010). Perseverance. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

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Learning More

Resources worth checking out

Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement by Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, Berrett-Koehler, 2018.

A practical and enlightening book for leaders in all contexts (including parents and teachers), Conversations Worth Having shows us how to use our conversations to maximize outcomes and help people flourish. The approach “represents a breakthrough in the combined fields of Appreciative Inquiry and Peter Drucker-like strengths-based management, positive psychology, and design thinking” (p. 7).

A quick but valuable read, this resource offers mental tools for maintaining a learning mindset while interacting with others. Conversations worth having as described as:

• Meaningful
• Mutually enlivening and engaging
• Geared to generating information, knowledge, and possibility
• Solution- or outcome-focused
• Positive
• Productive

These conversations rely on two simple practices: positive framing and generative questions. Readers are encouraged to build their skill in using these practices through an informal action research approach – try out the techniques and notice what happens. Stavros and Torres offer this challenge: “There are many possible worlds out there. The probability that any one of them comes into being depends on our conversations. What kind of conversation will you have next?” (p. 133).