Resistance is a phenomenon that occurs frequently during coaching. For a coach, they are the guiding lights. And most often, for coachees the very reason they seek coaching.

However, they’ll rarely mention them as the resistance will not be as conscious to them as their consequence. When resistance appears it usually leads to some form of distraction, that is avoidance. Resistance is a form of stress, and stress easily leads to the archaic response of fight or flight.

Awareness of one’s stress or of situations causing such stress is a sometimes painful and yet helpful clue. They are painful as long as they are pushed away and while one has to learn to become aware of them. Once awareness is established, they become information and lead to the ability to slow down and choose one’s reaction. It’s a path leading to self-acceptance. Paradoxically also one allowing change.

There are a few areas in which leaders may need to develop more awareness and connect it with self-awareness.

One of them is their field of activity. Every profession can be linked to a code of ethics. But it is only in practice that people’s values are affected, that is when the ethical questions emerge and need to be answered.

What makes these questions sometimes difficult to deal with, is that they are impacted by people’s expectations as to how a situation should be and how it is.

There is hardly an organization that will not allow for more work to be present than can be done. When they are confronted with the situation, they have to decide if the available resources can be changed, if the work promised will be adapted to the available resources, or, for example, what they will require the team to do. Others might have to deal with accidents and find themselves wondering how to deal with the consequences.

Beyond awareness of the challenges the area of activity can cause there are the ones resulting from one’s way of working as well as one’s way of relating.

Leaders need to develop an awareness of how they do their work. That is, for example, their ability to deal with complex situations. It involves their willingness to reflect on and analyze these situations, formulate working hypotheses, and take strategic action.

They also have to watch their contribution to building positive working relationships within the team and beyond it. Much of this can be out of awareness as people get used to the dynamics or the sense of liking some people more than others, taking them as normal. But these easily impact the way some decisions are made.

In all of these situations, resistance will appear to question oneself. Asking oneself how one deals with the stress one experiences in these situations, requires self-awareness to see and accept the existence of the stress.

As long as the stress remains invisible, it will make it difficult to decide on the subject itself.