A Pile of Snakes
The analogy that seems to keep coming up in my coaching conversations recently is one of my favorite scenes from Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a truly strange and wonderful movie.
Pee Wee Herman comes upon a pet shop in flames and dashes in to save the endangered pets. First he frees a chimp to help him along (very smart move!) and then gets to the puppies, the kittens, the birds and so on. On each trip in and out of the burning shop, he passes a large tank of snakes. He sneers at them each time, feeling the gross-out resistance to the challenge.
Finally, the tank of snakes are last living things in the shop and he can't NOT save them, so he grabs two handfuls of snake and runs out, shouting at the top of his lungs as he collapses on the street.
End scene.
I related this absurd vignette to two people I coach. One is a startup CEO who felt like they needed to spend time on their sales pitch deck instead of product-market-fit. Another is a director of learning and development who had an email sitting in their inbox for a week, glaring at them to respond to a group of senior leaders.
Resisting Resistance
Both of them needed to hear this story so that they could stop playing the "snakes are gross" game with themselves. Resisting resistance creates more resistance. This is what I mean when I say that "resistance is information".
For example, the CEO needed to look at why "sales" felt repulsive. They had a narrative around funding that left them feeling conflicted: you are either funding or building. If you half-fund or half-build, you're not doing it right. Sitting with the resistance and the story behind it helped them turn funding into a sprint and an experiment. This approach made them feel curious and excited to do a cycle of fundraising. It didn't have to be forever. it could be a two-week cycle. Once they got curious about the resistance, the path became more clear.
Becoming curious about resistance
For the Director of Learning, just telling me about her resistance allowed her to take a step back and look at the story behind it. The “pile of snakes story” helped her see that her resistance to the email was a self-reinforcing cycle. Or, as my wife likes to say “what you resist, persists.”
Curiosity about resistance is a gentle and effective path “through”.
This idea is just as true for coaches. Resistance is information to be curious about. It’s much easier to react to resistance as disrespect. I was coaching a friend of mine who is (in turn) coaching an innovation team. He was feeling resistance from the team. This team was part of a larger initiative to build an innovation process, including a growth board and milestones for funding of initiatives.
Just like my CEO, the team wanted to build their product and get traction, not build decks about their process and experiments in order to get the next fundraise from their innovation board.
The complaint from my friend was that "they aren't listening to me...how do I get them to buy into this larger, systematic approach to innovation?"
From the coach's perspective, the team needed to learn a systematic approach to reporting on experiments, not to just keep experimenting.
As we probed more deeply, it turned out that there was a simple explanation. The team didn't think that the innovation board mattered. If they could show enough traction, they had been told by a senior stakeholder, that there was some money they could float them.
The resistance wasn't a battle between a coach and a team. That was the story my friend was telling themselves. Given that the situation was seen as a battle, they wanted to know how to gain an upper hand in the battle.
When they got curious about the resistance instead, the way became much more clear - they needed to change the game the team was playing...because they were definitely trying to game the system.
What are you resisting? What are your stakeholders or collaborators resisting? How can you get curious about the tension and lean into it?
And then...how can you change the game you're playing?