As you get going in a new year, many of you will have various key projects or initiatives which need tackling at work - some of these you'll be keen to get on with and others not so much. Amongst the latter are those tasks, projects and initiatives which seem to remain stubbornly on your to-do list however much you tell yourself you need to get on with them.

While some people might put this heavy reluctance down to procrastination, Stephen Pressfield, in his popular book The War of Art, identifies this internal blocker to doing worthwhile work as resistance. Although Pressfield is primarily writing for those in creative fields, resistance is a feature in almost everyone's work life. You know resistance when you feel it - it hangs over you, it saps your headspace, it keeps you feeling stuck and blocks clarity both of thought and action.

Because delivering progress is key to the value I deliver, identifying and tackling resistance is a feature of my work with teams, individuals and organisations. I can think of one organisational client, who, within a few short months of working with me, successfully executed on two significant initiatives which had been stuck in organisational resistance for the previous five years! 

A couple of years ago, a client with whom I was working found that he was struggling to develop his (excellent) professional relationships into actual client engagements. Fast forward a few months and he was onboarding new clients with increasing effectiveness, confidence and ease. How did he get there?

Firstly, we identified and acknowledged his resistance. It's easy to downplay or minimise resistance: "I'm just being a bit lazy", "It's the current circumstances", "It's no big deal; we'll get around to it eventually." 

Feedback from his colleagues as well as our coaching conversations helped this client to see that his struggle converting clients was a real blocker, something he genuinely struggled to do - acknowledging that the struggle was real and the resistance was real was transformative for him.

Secondly we examined whether the resistance was actually a help rather than a hindrance. If that seems totally counterintuitive, let me explain what I mean.

Just as your emotions can give you vital information, so can your resistance. Your resistance might be telling you that although the thing it's currently blocking was important, desirable or beneficial a year or six months ago, things have changed (or you have changed) and so your desired Outcomes need to change too.

In the case of the client above, everyone around him had made assumptions as to what he wanted at work. But, as readers of "To Be Clear..." know, unquestioned assumptions are often the enemy of clarity. 

So I asked him whether he really wanted to progress to the next level. The question was a challenge but he also said that it provided him with the space and safety to honestly ask and answer that question - free from the judgements, pressures and assumptions which had clouded his vision up until that point. This process of discovery is something pretty much all of my clients consistently tell me is a transformative part of working together and improving their practice and performance.

Perhaps you (or a colleague or a team member) are struggling with resistance at work at the moment. How can you get clearer (or help them to get clearer) - on whether your resistance is friend rather than foe - alerting you to no longer relevant desires or to objectives which need to be reassessed, tweaked or jettisoned entirely?

This previous edition of "To Be Clear..." should be helpful here but here are a few questions you might ask: "What are the benefits/ impacts of doing this or continuing with this?", "Do I/ we still want this?" and "Is this something I/ we still need?" 

The first layer of ONION - Outcome - is a great place to make a start with looking at your objectives more objectively.

You might be asking, "What if I ask these questions and I discover that my resistance is a blocker to something I want/ still think is worth pursuing?" That's where this client found himself, clearer than ever that he did want what lay on the other side of his resistance and clearer than ever on why.

At that point, we moved on to the next phase of tackling his resistance which is a subject for the next edition of "To Be Clear..."* But, before we get there, why not begin by identifying any resistance in the things you're struggling to get going on this year. And then why not have a go at asking - and answering - the questions above?

I look forward to hearing from you as to how that goes.