The Most Convincing Form of Resistance

In Work Without Working, I named a number of ways resistance shows up in our lives. A recent conversation with someone showed me I had completely glossed over an important disguise that resistance loves to take. 

The disguise? Inflexibility. Inflexibility doesn’t feel like resistance. That’s why it works so well.

We become so married to our positions (both mental and emotional) that we refuse to see any other possibility besides our own. 

The degree to which we are inflexible is the degree to which we suffer.
It is the degree to which we are unable to effect a solution to our problems, find answers to our concerns, innovate, and successfully attain our goals.

But wait, you say, aren’t we exhorted to be single-minded in the pursuit of our goals? Sure. But how we attain our goals requires mental and emotional flexibility. If we determine there is only one way to get to where we want to go, we are already stuck.

In my recent conversation, the person was a leader of a charitable organization that partnered with a local government agency. This leader disagreed with some of the rules of the government agency and tried to circumvent them. The situation devolved into a power struggle. The leader and charitable organization both lost: the rules remained unchanged, and the much-beloved leader felt obligated to resign, not just from the leadership position but from the organization entirely, due to the acrimonious interactions. 

In speaking with me, the leader was adamantly opposed to ‘accepting’ the position of the agency. This is a common mistake: thinking that Acceptance = approving of injustice, tolerating what should be changed, or playing dead in the face of challenge. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.
Acceptance is not weakness.
In fact, Acceptance is the precondition of all wise action.

Additionally, the leader described the staff at the agency as stupid idiots. That may be so. They may be stupid; they may be idiots. But what does thinking and labeling them as such solve? Reality check: these were the people the organization needed to deal with and thinking of them in this way exacted a heavy price. As does all emotional reactivity. In this case the price was failure to move the needle even a little closer to where the charitable organization wanted to be. They also lost a valued member.

Here’s the thing: the mind loves fixity. It wants to decide something is so, label it so, and then move on. It has closure. No open loop here. But unless checked, fixity can morph into lack of creativity and openness, ingredients necessary for new and innovative solutions to problems. Even productivity problems.

The key to these conundrums is the neutralization of our resistance. Simply ‘managing’ our emotional states is not enough, in fact, it is counter-productive. Trying to change an “I hate this” to an “I love this” is a waste of time and energy.

Friction, the sign that resistance is present, thrives in inflexibility. You transform it by naming only what is objective and factual. This is not passive. This is power. This is you refusing to fight what already is, the reality of what is.

This is how The Frictionless Mindset begins.

Next week: The attachment to process and outcome pest that’s destroying your productivity crop.

Yours in flexibility,
Alessandra

P.S. Want to know more about resistance? Directive 1 in my book is available online, completely unabridged and free at www.workwithoutworking.co Enjoy!