“I know I have to change, and I can’t.” “I feel as though I am sabotaging what I decided myself.” “Why is this stuck, when I am perfectly motivated?”
I hear these sentences regularly, from people who run entire organisations. They do not signal a lack of will. They signal a brain doing exactly its job.
What frightens people is not change
It is the loss of bearings. A leader can carry a reorganisation without flinching and then stall on a far smaller trade-off, because that one touches something that was holding.
There are three forms of resistance, and telling them apart is often enough to unblock the situation - because you stop treating a problem of safety as a problem of conviction.
1. Neurological resistance: the brain prefers the predictable
Change activates uncertainty, and uncertainty is expensive. The brain favours automatic responses, including counter-productive ones. That is why an organisation clings to a routine no one can see the point of any more: it is predictable.
What this resistance asks for is not more argument. It is a frame: what changes, what does not, and by when.
2. Emotional resistance: what the decision stirs up
Fear of failing, fear of disappointing, fear of being judged. And, more often than one might think among seasoned leaders, fear of succeeding - because succeeding commits you to what comes next.
This resistance is not treated by method. It is treated by naming it, somewhere naming it carries no political consequence. That is precisely what most leaders do not have.
3. Social resistance: to change is to move within a group
To change is sometimes to move away from your own. To disturb implicit roles, to step out of an old loyalty, to stop being the person others counted on to hold a position.
It is the least often named and the most stubborn. A leadership team can sincerely endorse a direction and never implement it, simply because no one wants to be the first to move.
What this changes in the way I work
A transformation is not a sprint of willpower. It is work in which you secure what can be secured, name what weighs, and clarify what the decision displaces in the relationships around it.
In my engagements, that is what the second movement of the way I work is for: changing the frame in which a decision is read. A decision that is impossible in one frame often becomes obvious in another - not because new information turned up, but because it stopped being read as a threat.
It is also why I never ask a leader to “get motivated”. Motivation has almost never been the problem.
Read also - What your non-decisions cost you · What you no longer see
Or see the three ways of working together.
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