Saying Yes, Letting Go

May 6, 2003 at 4:00 pm — Power, Resistance

Sometimes saying yes is hard. My challenge today is to pull the trigger on a long-overdue decision. I’ve decided to focus my consulting business on a specific area of service: helping people respond to resistance.

Resistance is a topic that energizes me. Resistance puzzles people, so people often want help responding well. I’ve studied resistance and learned a great deal about how to work with resistance, so I have help to offer. Many people know how I can help with resistance, so the people who might want my help will be able to find me. I’ve talked with hundreds of people about this challenging topic, and conducted dozens of workshops. There is great energy around resistance. I love working with people about resistance.

I’ve known all of this for years. For years I’ve considered focusing on resistance. So now I’m saying yes.

Why did I wait years? Because yes is hard. Saying yes to resistance means giving less attention to other things I love. I love coaching about management challenges. I love facilitating teams. I love conducting retrospectives. I love helping groups refine their processes. When I say yes to resistance, I don’t have to stop doing those other things that I love. But I will put less emphasis on them. I have to let go. Letting go of the things I love is hard, even when it helps me say yes to the things I love the most.

Hard or not, it’s time to say yes. To myself. Yes!

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5 Comments »

Comment by Donna Woodka — May 6, 2003 at 11:25 pm

Your background sounds so similar to mine - I would love to talk with you about your business and how you got started. I consulted for eight years and then got sucked back into the full-time world doing software QA as the result of a consulting job setting up QA process for a company and being hired to run it - all the time I felt underneath it I wanted to get back to doing the things I really enjoyed the most. So I underatand what you’re saying - I have to get back to saying yes to what it is I most want to do….

Comment by Frank Patrick — May 7, 2003 at 2:37 pm

Dale — If you like resistance, you’ll get a chuckle from the title of a paper on my website — “Taking Advantage of Resistance to Change to Improve Improvements.” It’s found at… http://www.focusedperformance.com/articles/resistance.html

Comment by Dale Emery — May 7, 2003 at 9:20 pm

Frank, thank you for the link to your article. The TOC tools you describe, and the “Categories of Legitimate Reservation” ideas that Dettmer describes in Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, can be very helpful in exploring people’s expectations, and in clarifying our own.

Comment by Mike Sheridan — May 9, 2003 at 10:59 pm

Yes, but what about inductance, reactance, and capacitance? Very good! I’ve been following your writings every since Dave told me about your site. I must say you both write very well. A gift that most of us wish we had.

Keep up the good work.

Comment by Dale Emery — May 13, 2003 at 2:26 am

Inductance, reactance, and capacitance are definitely fun metaphors for how people and organizations respond to change.

Where resistance is opposition to flow, inductance is opposition to change in flow. So where organizations resistance tends to oppose change, organizational inductance would tend to keep the rate of change constant.

Capacitance, on the other hand, allows a device to store a charge. You might see organizational capacitance in a manager who tries to shield the group from changes going on around it. The manager “absorbs” the external changes, until the manager, um, discharges.

I’ll leave reactance as a metaphor for others to explore. And what about electron flow versus hole flow?

Several years ago, I gave two presentations at a management conference, one presentation about resistance and the other about power. From the topics, you’d think I was talking to electrical engineers.

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