Making resistance work for you
Having spent more than a quarter of a century in the corporate world, I have experienced the highs, the lows, the exhilarating moments and the days that have tested every bit of patience I had.
Through it all, one thing has consistently worked for me: focusing on what I can control.
I cannot always change the people I work with, the environment I find myself in or the circumstances around me. But I can choose how I engage with them. I can choose how I interpret a situation, what I take away from it and how I respond.
I have found that looking at the same situation differently can change the experience entirely. It has often helped me find meaning, satisfaction and even joy in situations that might otherwise have felt difficult.
This brings me to the metaphor of a resistance band.
A resistance band builds strength because it pushes back. It is the tension, the resistance and the way we engage with it that makes us stronger. Life and work are not very different. Resistance is inevitable. How we engage with it is what matters.
And this is where my coaching journey begins.
I want to partner with people and create the space and time to pause and look at the situations they find themselves in. To reflect on what is happening, reframe what it means to them and then choose how they want to respond.
The circumstances may not change. The people around us may not change. But our relationship with the situation can. And sometimes, that changes everything.
There is another dimension to this that is deeply personal to me.
Having been a woman in leadership, I have seen how the workplace can encourage us to follow established ways of working and leading. Much of the corporate world has been shaped by traditional, predominantly male models of leadership. It is easy to absorb these expectations and begin to believe that success means learning to operate in the same way.
I have been fortunate. I have had bosses, mentors, teams and peers who gave me the freedom to find my own way of leading. More than twenty years ago, a mentor told me three words that have stayed with me ever since:
YOU DO YOU.
Those words gave me permission to trust my own instincts, find my own voice and lead in a way that felt authentic to me.
I know not everyone has that kind of encouragement. And I believe coaching can create some of that space.
A space where women can recognise the expectations and patterns shaping their experience at work, reflect on where they find themselves, reframe situations in ways that serve them and decide how they want to respond.
Not by asking them to become someone else. But by helping them find their own way.
Because I don’t believe strength comes from removing all resistance from our lives. It comes from learning how to engage with it.
And sometimes, all it takes is the space to see things differently, the freedom to choose our response and the courage to act on it.