Common forms of resistance

The following list of common forms of resistance, though incomplete, is intended to help bring the picture into focus:

  • Give me more detail: The client keeps asking for finer and finer bits of information. … Each conveersation leaves you feeling like next time you shouldd bring even more backup data with you. … too little time is spent deciding what you are going to do. … When you start to get impatient with the questions, even though you are able to answer them, that is the moment to start suspecting the request for detail is a form of resistance and not a simple quest for information.
  • Flood you with detail: A corollary to the request for detail is to be given too much detail. … The moment you start to get bored or confused about what all this has to do with the problem at hand, you should begin to suspect that what you are getting is resistance and not just an effusive attempt to give you all the facts.
  • Time: The client says she would really like to go ahead with your project ut the timing is just a little off. … The whole time issue, which we all face every day, is most often resistance against the client’s having to tell you how he or she really feels about your project.
  • Impracticality: … the client accuses us of beging impractical and academic.
  • I’m not surprised: See the client’s desire not to be surprised for what it is - a form of resistance and not really a reflection on your work.
  • Attack: Our response to attack is often either to withdraw or to respond in kind. Both responses mean that we are beginning to take the attack personally and not seeing it as one other form the resistance is taking.
  • Confusion: …
  • Silence: This is the toughest of all. … Silence never means consent. If you are dealing with something important to the organization, it is not natural for the client to have no reaction.
  • Intellectualizing: When a person shifts the discussion from deciding how to proceed and starts exploring theory after theory about why things are the way they are, you are face to face with intellectualizing as resistance. … The time to suspect intellectualizing is when it begins at a high-tension moment or in a high-tension meeting. When this happens, your task is to bring the discussion back to actions, away from theories.
  • Moralizing: …
  • Compliance: The most difficult form of resistance to see comes from the compliant manager who totally agrees with you and eagerly wants to know what to do next.
  • Methodology: As the questions about method go past the ten minute mark, you should cautiously begin to view them as resistance.
  • Flight into health: … somewhere in the middle or toward the end of the project, it appears that the client no longer has the problem that you were addressing in the first place.
  • Pressing for solution: The last form of resistance is the client’ desire for solutions, solutions, solutions. “Don’t talk about to me about problems, I want to hear solutions.” —p140-148, Flawless consulting

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