Resistance is signal

Allow me to use a personal anecdote to introduce a concept that’s highly relevant to business.

In 2025, I finally leveled up my gym workouts, from a chore delivering moderate results to an enjoyable activity that delivers excellent results. What changed wasn’t the workout routine, but the stance I took toward resistance.

For years, I treated emotional resistance as something to power through. And power through I did: I went to the gym, lifted weights, did “the inputs.” But I did them from a negative mental state, doubting my body, feeling defensive, and looking for reasons to stop. In that state, I would train barely outside my comfort zone and quit at the smallest inconvenience. The result was a lot of mental and physical effort for modest returns.

Then I tried a different approach: treat persistent resistance not as an obstacle, but as information. I started asking: What exactly am I resisting? Not “the gym” in general, but specific triggers of discomfort, such as the cold dressing room, that exercise I thought might injure me, or that other exercise others seemed to “get” but which I seemed to be terrible at. I then addressed each objection individually. Most pieces of friction, I reduced. Every exercise I felt unsafe doing, I learned how to do safely. And every doubt about technique, I clarified. (Tools like ChatGPT were excellent partners for this, not as “motivation,” but as a way to quickly get clarity and options.)

Once I addressed all my doubts and mental objections one-by-one, the resistance melted. Not only did going to the gym become more enjoyable, but I could do most exercises from a mental state of confidence and eagerness rather than doubt, which is a prerequisite for doing them well enough and lifting heavy enough weights to get the desired rewards.

The point is that going to the gym is an activity, like many others, where you can technically produce its inputs in a negative mental state, but they won’t be good enough to bring satisfying results unless done with confidence. Therefore, chronic resistance is not something to dismiss or power through, but something to acknowledge, dissect, and address until resolved.

(There’s an exception, though: occasional resistance. If you feel like going to the gym most days, but don’t once or twice a month, you can power through that. But if the resistance is persistent, powering through it will mostly produce mediocre results.)

It turns out sports isn’t the only context where this principle applies. A lot of business works the same way.

Resistance at work

Many white-collar activities share the same property as the gym: you can get mediocre outcomes by going through the motions, but to get great results, you must do them from a mental state of openness, confidence, and willingness.

If it seems otherwise, it’s because we consider an overly short time frame. If today’s output is the only thing that matters, sure, just power it through. But if your goal is to grow beyond what you can do today, you have to address the resistance.

In fact, this matters even more than skill, over the long run. After all, it’s hard to grow your skills beyond a certain point if you feel defensive or resistant. People don’t learn much while bracing.

So a significant part of management (and self-management) is about making sure your team spends as little time as possible in a defensive or resistant mental state.

But you can’t achieve this using woo-hoo methods or anything that acts on the person as a whole. (At least, I wouldn’t recommend it.) Instead, dissect resistance into the specific actions and triggers that cause it, and then address as many of those as you reasonably can.

Common causes of chronic resistance

Here are some common causes of chronic resistance:

• Uncertainty: “I don’t know what I should do.”
• Lack of skill: “I don’t know how to do it.”
• Lack of confidence: “I haven’t done it successfully before.”
• Lack of feedback: “I did it wrong before, but I don’t know what exactly I did wrong.”
• Fear of irreversible consequences: “If I do it and fail, I won’t be able to recover from it.”
• Unnecessary friction: “This is more tedious than it needs to be.”
• Incentive misalignment: “I’m doing this for someone else, not for me.”
• Value conflict: “This feels wrong or pointless.”

Of course, you can’t remove all discomfort; some resistance is often part of the job. But you can often remove unnecessary resistance, especially that created by a lack of clarity, a lack of feedback, or a lack of confidence.

Look for steps within someone’s duties where they feel uncertain, such as a manager who feels resistance when they need to have difficult conversations. Some of that discomfort is normal, but a significant part may come from not knowing how to handle the conversation and having to make guesses in real time: what to say first, how direct to be, what to do if the other person reacts poorly, and so on. Or ask people where they feel the most resistance, and keep drilling down until it becomes specific. “I don’t like negotiations” is not actionable, but you can do something about “I freeze before saying something they can say no to, because I don’t know what the next move is,” or “I don’t know how to set a price without it feeling arbitrary.” Once it’s specific, it often becomes solvable.

Of course, not all resistance is justified, nor should every objection be accommodated. The point is that resistance is often a signal of a lack of information, skill, or experience. And those, you can address relatively easily.

The bottom line

Stop seeing chronic resistance (procrastination, going through the motions passively, or avoidance of a particular task) as something to power through but rather as something to understand and address.

And stop seeing chronic resistance as a permanent property of the person, and see it instead as a temporary property of the person in relation to one or more specific subparts of their tasks, each to be addressed individually.

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