Every coaching engagement involves change. Whether coaching an executive through a personal leadership transition or guiding an organization through systemic change, resistance is a natural—and often revealing part of the process.
In coaching, resistance is often misunderstood. It can be easy to label a client or team as “resistant” and assume they are not committed or not ready. In reality, resistance usually signals something deeper—fear, uncertainty, competing priorities, identity protection, or lack of control and trust.
This session takes a dual-track approach, exploring resistance both at the organizational level and the individual level. Participants will learn to recognize what is actually driving resistance in each context, and how to apply targeted coaching strategies that create safety, momentum, and lasting change.
Through discussion, diagnostic frameworks, and practical coaching scenarios, participants
will leave with a toolkit for meeting clients—whether organizations or individual
leaders—exactly where they are.
Why Should You Attend:
- You’ll stop seeing pushback as a barrier and start treating it as a diagnostic tool to uncover exactly what your client is afraid of or trying to protect.
- You will gain a deeper understanding of the psychological and systemic dynamics at play, allowing you to navigate the "close cousins" of resistance like fear, lost identity, and broken trust.
- You’ll leave with specific questioning techniques and frameworks designed to lower defensiveness and help your clients transform friction into productive momentum.
Participants will leave this session with:
1. Understanding Why Clients Resist: Gain insight into both the individual psychological drivers of resistance—such as identity threat, loss aversion, and ego protection—and the organizational factors that fuel systemic resistance, such as lack of control, lack of meaning, and fear for the future.
2. Diagnosing Resistance in Context: Learn how to identify where a client or organization is in the change process using practical frameworks—including the ADKAR model for individual coaching and Change Engagement Levels for organizational work—so you can target your coaching intervention precisely.
3. Coaching Strategies for Both Contexts: Discover evidence-based approaches tailored to each coaching context—including the invitational approach and the WIIFM conversation for individual executives, partnership-building tools, and positive momentum strategies for organizational change clients.
4. Measuring Progress and Sustaining Change: Learn how to design measurable experiments with individual clients and track adoption progress with organizational clients—turning resistance into momentum and maintaining forward movement over time.