Resistance arises in all change processes. It’s normal, natural, and the protector of our perceived needs. How can transformational coaches work with resistance? Here are some simple tips to keep in mind…
- Listen to understand where they’re coming from. Try to wrap your mind around their situation and open your heart to their experience. An image may even come to mind which represents the resistance (and this could be shared).
- Ask open questions that encourage deeper exploration of the resistance:
- What is behind the resistance? Can you describe it?
- Where is it coming from within you?
- Is this a pattern? Where else has this shown up in your life?
- In Deep Coaching our role is to hold a vibratory space of spiritual energy (higher consciousness) to help dissipate or dissolve the resistance. You are weaving in a kind of spiritual pressure that helps shift consciousness and outwork inner barriers to growth.
- You can also guide them into their bodies. Have them locate where the resistance is. What does it feel like? Invite them to take some deep breaths here, softening into the sensations and tension.
- When you sense the resistance is loosening its grip, or hear in the client the readiness and desire for a new dimension of being to arise, you can begin to explore:
- What is this situation calling for?
- What is trying to emerge?
- Then invite them into that way of being that is free of resistance, where they feel the strength and potential of ‘what wants to happen.’ Open a space and hold it for that healing experience of self.
With resistance, we’re not trying to change our clients’ perspectives or suggest ‘there’s another way to see this,’ for Deep Coaches it’s more organic than that. We are listening for clues, subtle or not so subtle, that tell us our clients desire a change in being, for the resistance to fall away. Resistance is a natural reaction to change, therefore the more space we can provide for our clients to be with and let go of resistance, the more readily they will move through what they’re needing to move through, and new perspectives will organically arise.