Overcoming resistance to change

By Bruce Firestone | Business Coaching

Jan 28

The fear of loss in most people is greater than the desire for gain so anyone’s discomfort with change is quite understandable.

In ancient times, when people went about gathering berries, they did so only during the day—nighttime was when bears, sabre-tooth tigers and other predators roamed and would attack you, so you went home at sundown. Then someone invented the torch.

They said, “Hooray, now we can harvest more berries cuz we’ll be able to work after dark too.”

But no one in the village was willing to risk it because the desire to eat a few more berries was a lot less compelling than the fear of being eaten yourself.

Modern humans experience this all the time without even knowing it so they do the same thing over and over again hoping each year for a different result. That leads to a status quo—nothing ever gets better, and it probably gets worse.

How to overcome that?

By the Socratic method—asking questions like:

  1. How is your situation today better than it was one year ago? Two years ago? Three years ago?
  2. How is it worse?
  3. What did you do to make it better?
  4. Why did it get worse?
  5. What will your situation look like in 1, 2 or 3 years?
  6. Why?
  7. What can you do in the next 1, 2 or 3 years to make it better?
  8. What’s holding you back?
  9. What’s the worst that can happen?
  10. Can you live with that?
  11. What’s the optimal outcome in 1, 2 or 3 years?
  12. What does your life look like then?

Instead of telling someone how to make their life better, you ask questions until they figure it out for themselves; then they have internalized the lessons…

Make any sense?

Basically, people need to be able to look at their situation by pulling back the camera—to fly over the earth at 3,000-feet, so they can look down at themselves. They need to use a different lens to re-frame their existing situation so they can create a new and different future.

Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD
Real Estate Investment and Business coach
ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker
Ottawa Senators founder
1-613-762-8884
bruce.firestone@century21.ca
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About the Author

Bruce is an entrepreneur/real estate broker/developer/coach/urban guru/keynote speaker/Sens founder/novelist/columnist/peerless husband/dad.

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