An Open Letter to Health & Wellness Professionals
Resistance is not the problem.
Yes, it can be incredibly frustrating that our clients get stuck - when something in them seems to go against what they want (or that we believe they should want). Maybe they come to us wanting to get fit, to eat more nutritiously, to recover from an injury, to heal past trauma, or any number of other intentions. But we notice that, whether implicitly or explicitly, they seem to get stuck or just not do what we believe would support them.
In other words, they seem to be dealing with some kind of resistance.
And their resistance can be frustrating when it seems to be getting in the way of us doing our jobs as health and wellness professionals.
But we miss the point entirely when we direct our efforts to help our clients to “make progress” against the resistance as if the resistance itself were the problem.
How to Work With Client Resistance
When it comes to navigating client resistance, the foundation of any other skills or guidance is this: work with resistance - not as something inconvenient or problematic, but as a vital part of the client's process.
Without this perspective, the specific approaches that I offer could be used to simply keep you stuck battling against resistance rather than…
How Client Resistance Shows Up
The short version is that client resistance shows up as any kind of “no” in response to something that they are trying to do. We call this no “resistance” particularly when it is directed at something that we (as wellness professionals) think our clients should do.
That “no” can sometimes be…
![Working With “Difficult” Clients [Means Working With Ourselves]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65308be099e6206436d93199/1acd192b-e1bd-433c-83eb-53e1107560b3/katja-vogt-RNXjjVRUYWo-unsplash.jpg)
Working With “Difficult” Clients [Means Working With Ourselves]
It’s Monday morning and you check your calendar for the upcoming week and you feel yourself tense up a bit. Your most “difficult” client is scheduled to come in this afternoon and you had totally forgotten…
What Your “Resistant Client” Wants You to Know
Well - these are the kinds of things they might want you to know. I can’t know for sure because each person is different. But these are some of the things that I have wanted wellness professionals to know when it comes to my own resistance, and my guess is that some of them might resonate for your clients, too.
While everyone has both motivation and resistance, some of us…
Is My Client Resistant?
Assuming that your client is probably a person (which is likely a pretty safe assumption)…then the answer is…
Do New Year’s Resolutions Work?
The statistics are out there to back up what we all know - that most of us tend to quickly abandon our new year’s resolutions. This is a well-known fact. And yet…
Should I Make New Year’s Resolutions?
I love reasons to start fresh.
I was one of the kids that loved the smell of the office supply store at the start of the school year, bringing with it the tangible sense of a new beginning (and I still can’t walk into one of them without a pang of nostalgia). I’ve always taken my birthday as a moment to reflect back and reset myself around what’s important to me. In any relationship I’ve had, I’ve always played up anniversaries of all kinds.
It only follows, then, that I’ve always been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. But because of the feeling of pressure…
What is Resistance?
I love resistance.
It honestly, truly, cross-my-heart brings me joy when people who seek me out for therapy express the parts of them that don't want therapy, healing, recovery, or whatever else they initially expressed that wanted to get from our work together.
The trick is…