This article is adapted from my book, Automatic Influence: New Power for Change in Work and Life (Stone Lounge Press, 2016)…
There are all sorts of reasons we resist change, but let’s look at three of them: complacency, useless fear, and imagined inability.
Reason #1: Complacency
The first reason we resist is that we don’t see the need for change. We’re blind to danger.
- A chain-smoker says, “Things are fine as they are,” but things aren’t fine at all. She ignores the warnings and runs the risk of lung cancer.
- A manager says, “We don’t need to worry about our competition; our customers are loyal.” He fails to improve and runs the risk of losing customers to the competition.
In both cases, there’s a false feeling that things are okay. They’re both blind to danger.
Complacency also happens when we’re blind to opportunity. Imagine there’s a job opening near where a woman named Abbey works. Same schools, same commute, same benefits, but it pays $20,000 more.
Abbey doesn’t know about the job opening, so she can’t make the most of this opportunity.
Economists call this opportunity cost, which is the price we pay for failing to take advantage of the best opportunities available to us.
Reason #2: Useless Fear
The second reason we resist change is useless fear.[i] We’re afraid that something bad might happen, so we avoid opportunity.
I say useless fear because some fear is useful, like the fear of heights. Years ago, I walked with my wife Sandra to see the Nakalele Blowhole on the north side of Maui. We took a path that went just inches from a hundred-foot drop, and it freaked me out. As it should.
Whenever a threat is real, it’s useful to fear.
- We should fear driving ninety when the speed limit says thirty-five.
- We should fear walking near a mother grizzly with cubs.
- It’s useful to fear the sudden sharp pain in our chest.
Useful fear moves us to escape real threats. But when there’s no real threat, or the chance of threat is slim, that’s useless fear. Useless fear is like a rubber snake boys use to scare their mothers. It looks harmful, but it isn’t.
If useless fear is a rubber snake, useful fear is a rattlesnake. It looks harmful because it is harmful. The key is to identify rubber snakes and rattlesnakes, avoid the rattlesnakes, and not be rattled by the rubber snakes.
Reason #3: Imagined Inability
A third reason we resist change is imagined inability. We tell ourselves, I can’t learn math. I can’t get over this habit. I can’t handle the workload. We see ourselves as unable, even though we have the ability.
Imagined inability is like a plastic chain, the kind they use in movie props and with Halloween costumes. They look real, but they’ll break easily when we pull on them.
In the same way we separate useful and useless fears, we also must separate actual inability and imagined inability. No matter how much we shout at a football game on television, the players can’t hear us. We can’t affect the outcome. This is actual inability. (We’re still going to shout, though!) Likewise, we don’t have the ability to change the weather, or change the past, or change the day of the week. These are ironclad facts of life.
But imagined inability is different. We believe we can’t learn to lead others better, but we can. We think we can’t control our temper, but we can. We imagine we’re unable to finish the work project by the deadline, but we can.
How to Break the Resistance
Notice how all of these three forces—complacency, useless fear, and imagined inability—all spring from the wrong way of seeing. They are perception problems.
- We feel complacency because we can’t see the dangers and missed opportunities involved in status quo. Since we can’t see the danger and opportunity, we can’t feel the urgency.
- We feel useless fear because we imagine danger that isn’t real.
- We feel hopeless and inadequate because we inaccurately see ourselves as unable.
The secret of effective change is to start with the perceptions that automatically influence these motivations.
- We overcome complacency with a clear view of the dangers and opportunities.
- We see the fear as useless and unfounded, then face it until the fear goes away.
- We get a true view of our power to change things, breaking the chains of imagined inability.
These three reasons we resist all trace to wrong ways of seeing, which points us to our escape: We can get totally free by changing the way we see.
[i] The phrase useless fear was coined by the world’s foremost authority on anxiety, South African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe. See Joseph Wolpe and David Wolpe, Our Useless Fears (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981).
