Encountering Resistance: How to Stop Dragging Your Feet and Leap into Action
Olivia needed to prepare a presentation for the board of her organization on their financial goals and fundraising plans. She’d had weeks to get ready, but she couldn’t get herself in gear. Olivia had enthusiastically set strategic goals with her team and talked about creative ways to fundraise. Why was she coming up short on enthusiasm now?
We’ve all encountered resistance—dragging our feet to get something done, even when we know we should. We may even want to do it, but something is holding us back.
What gets in the way?
Resistance is tricky - there are multiple sources. What you decide to do about it will depend on what’s causing it for you. Let’s dig in and identify the root cause so you can pinpoint the best course of action.
Explore where resistance is coming from
You’re burned out.
Burnout can happen when you feel overwhelmed and lack time to recharge. It can also stem from not being treated fairly or having unclear expectations.
Your role is no longer a good fit.
If your work doesn’t challenge you or fall into your main areas of interest, you may feel like you’re slogging through the tasks on your plate.
You can’t break free of your urgency mindset.
Having an urgency mindset can be self-defeating if you can’t step out of it enough to actually carry out the task. You want everything to happen yesterday, and you thrive on feeling productive. If you’re taking on a new type of task with a learning curve or a task that will simply take time, it’s tough to be patient with the process.
You’re uneasy with a change your task represents.
According to immunity to change theory developed by Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan, people often unconsciously resist change because it conflicts with their feelings, track record, or worldview. On a deep level, you may not believe in the change or your own ability to implement it—even if you’ve pledged to carry it out! Without meaning to, you then block the change from taking root.
Similarly, the task at hand may be something you really care about, so you may feel like you need to approach it in just the right way, at just the right time. That’s an all-too-common form of self-sabotage, says Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Maybe you’re waiting for the perfect time when you can devote a full day to the task. Or perhaps you feel anxious about whether you can do it as well as you hope. Either way, this leads you to postpone actually doing it.
Now that you’ve identified what’s fueling your resistance, let’s dive into how to take action.
Confront your resistance
When confronting your inner resistance, each of these root causes will require something different from you. What you’ll do to address burnout looks different than how you’ll address an urgency mindset, which looks different than addressing a role you no longer fit. Focus on the steps that apply most directly to you, and make sure you’re addressing the right root cause.
How to deal with burnout
When confronting burnout, many leaders and organizations view taking a vacation or a day off as a quick solution. But research shows that’s just a superficial fix. It’s important, but it doesn’t change the culture of overwork that is perpetuating burnout.
So, what should you do?
Connect with your purpose. You love what your organization is doing, but perhaps you’re so mired in reports or analysis that you’ve lost touch with the day-to-day. Get your hands dirty—it will be good for everyone’s morale.
Block out time for learning about something you love that will benefit your work. Or, dive into a hobby you’ve had on the back burner to re-energize.
Evaluate, eliminate, delegate—weed out your schedule to tame overwhelm. If you don’t have a reasonable workload, burnout is inevitable.
Make time for rest in your day. I know, it sounds counterintuitive within a workplace culture that demands we stay laser-focused on productivity every moment of the day. But letting yourself rest—whether you take a short nap or let your mind relax as you take a walk—can help you recharge, stay efficient, and leave work on time.
Adopt a practice of gratitude as part of your daily routine to help tame stress. This doesn’t mean you need to feel grateful every moment—you’re human. But placing attention on what you’re grateful for can positively affect your mood and energy levels.
Reflect on what triggers you to say yes when you know you shouldn’t so you can avoid burnout in the future.
2. Steps to take if your role (or components of it) is no longer a good fit
If you genuinely don’t love your role, take steps to change it. Or, if you’ve been experiencing “role creep,” work to reset responsibilities.
Do a mind-mapping visioning exercise to think creatively about what you really want to do. Write your role at the center of a sheet of paper and draw “branches” highlighting responsibilities you find fulfilling.
Consider all the options:
Should your organization create a new position to handle some responsibilities because your role has gradually expanded? This issue can easily arise in expanding organizations.
Do you need someone with more expertise in a niche area to do some (or all) of this task? Talk to a fellow leader in another department (if applicable) about whether someone they supervise would be a great fit. Consider each “lending” one another a team member for a cross-training opportunity that leverages their skills.
Get trained in a new skill if you’d really like to handle this type of task yourself. As your confidence grows, your resistance may drop dramatically.
Keep a journal of how you feel about your daily activities so you’ll know where you find the most meaning (and what you could do without).
3. How to overcome an urgency mindset
First, recognize how your urgency mindset affects you and your whole team by ramping up stress levels. Then, take action:
Your most meaningful tasks are unlikely to have deadlines; it’s usually the smaller or more routine tasks that do. So, create deadlines with generous timeframes for the big, meaningful tasks. Block out a whole afternoon or even a whole day for a big task you’ve been putting off, advises Alice Boyes in Harvard Business Review.
Take ownership of how you’re imposing a forced urgency mentality and enlist your team’s support in overcoming it. Ask them to tell you when you’re projecting unnecessary urgency onto a situation.
Break tasks into chunks so you can more accurately map out what you can accomplish each day. “Complete Step 1” feels more actionable than “Begin working on Daunting Task A”—and since you thrive on measurable results, this will motivate you to begin.
4. How to deal with anxiety about a change.
Navigating change requires not just new technical skills but also a mindset shift, as Lahey and Kegan explain. Here’s how to make that shift happen:
Determine your approach to change. Do you act too rashly, deny that it’s happening, resist the change with everything you’ve got, or proactively manage it?
Understand the transition cycle that we all go through when experiencing change. William Bridges, author of Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, explains the three stages of change: the ending, the neutral stage, and the new beginning. During the first stage, we may resist change because we are mourning what we’ve lost.
Be empathetic toward yourself and your team, particularly while going through the ending stage. Unpack your fears and uncertainties to understand and address them.
Examine your own immunity to change using the process outlined by Lahey and Kegan:
What behaviors are you engaging in that block the very change you’re working to accomplish? Write them down.
Identify the emotions that are fueling those behaviors.
Pinpoint your core assumptions about yourself that are fostering those emotions. Examine their accuracy. Can you create a set of healthier, more realistic assumptions to contradict them?
Prepare to spend several months overcoming those old assumptions. Block out 30 minutes a week to reflect on how they have manifested in your life and how you can work with a healthier set of assumptions.
In Immunity to Change, Lahey and Kegan provide a helpful chart template for mapping this out. You might find it useful in structuring your approach.
Olivia realized she’d been anxious about presenting financial changes to the board. She’d felt revved up when talking about exciting new possibilities with her team, but now, she worried about how the board would receive the ideas. What if they simply said no?
But what if they say yes? She suddenly thought. Then, the change would be real. She would be responsible for seeing it through. Ultimately, she realized, her resistance didn’t just come from anxiety about what the board would say—it came from her own discomfort with change.
Recognizing the real cause, Olivia envisioned how they would take the first steps toward implementing the changes. She reminded herself of the capabilities of each team member. And then she dug in, creating a powerful presentation that completely floored the board members.
Are you navigating resistance in your work and leadership? Check out the Women’s Leadership Incubator - a leadership coaching program facilitated by Amanda to help you break it down. Applications due soon!
Sources
William Bridges Associates, “Bridges Transition Model”
https://wmbridges.com/about/what-is-transition/
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Harvard Business Review, “6 Causes of Burnout, and How to Avoid Them”
https://hbr.org/2019/07/6-causes-of-burnout-and-how-to-avoid-them
Harvard Business Review, “Using Gratitude to Counter Stress and Uncertainty”
https://hbr.org/2020/10/use-gratitude-to-counter-stress-and-uncertainty
Mark J. G. Govers, “Book Review, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization,” International Journal of Integrated Care, 9(2009), e97.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2807119/
Harvard Business Review, “How to Focus on What’s Important, Not Just What’s Urgent”
https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-to-focus-on-whats-important-not-just-whats-urgent
Inc., “Overcome the Urgency Addiction to Become the Leader Your Team Needs”
https://www.inc.com/scott-miller/overcome-urgency-addiction-to-become-leader-your-team-needs.html
Lisa Laskow Lahey & Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change (2009)
The New York Times, “Will More Vacation Solve Burnout?”https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/business/dealbook/vacation-burnout.html
NPR, “Burnout Isn’t Just Exhaustion. Here’s How to Deal with It”
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974787023/burnout-isnt-just-exhaustion-heres-how-to-deal-with-it