Navigating Resistance

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What is your roleInformed choiceEmpowerment vs. PowerFight, Flight or FreezeCultureRighting reflexAnd so much more!

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Tami Calais: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the communication solution podcast. Here at IFIOC we love to talk communication, we love to talk motivational interviewing, and we love talking about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve. Today, we've got Casey Jackson on the line, John Gilbert.

And I'm Tammy. Welcome to the conversation.

John Gilbert: Hello and welcome everyone. You are listening to another conversation with us at the team here. Today we have, uh, a topic. I was surprised we haven't talked about fully yet, but it is gonna be navigating resistance. And so you might have this in a variety of different situations, personal professional, all sorts of different things.

And so we talk a lot about this in our intro to motivational interviewing course that will reference throughout. And there's some other, uh, resources like MI minutes setting Casey [00:01:00] can speak to, that will point you towards afterwards, but for now, that's what we're gonna be kind of setting the tone with.

In terms of resistance, one thing that came to mind for me, Casey, is something that years ago you brought up of the whole rubber band analogy and kind of the physics 1 0 1 thing. So I think that could be a place to start if you are both open to that. But at some point I think that would be helpful just to get a sense of defining our terms a little bit, or what are we talking about instead of the maybe stigma that happens when you think.

Making the label that someone is being resistant. So I don't know if you'd mind starting there.

Casey Jackson: Well, I, I think it's interesting because if we kind of unwind the history a bit of this in the beginning, when I first was learning motivational interviewing and, and getting trained on it and then training on it, resistance was a term we used literally rolling with resistance and then it started falling out of favor.

And the big shift was towards discord. And I understood the thinking behind it. Because what they were saying is [00:02:00] we don't wanna label the individual as being resistant. We don't wanna label the individuals being resistant. You know, what do we contribute to that? You know, so there's discord, there's tension between people.

And it was interesting because I had been training resistance as the energy between two things, because I I'm so a little freakish about semantics. Like I, I, I need to, my brain needs to know what it means. And so I'd researched and, and looked up, you know, the source of it had to. Physics, you know, when you're looking at human physics or when you're looking at, you know, just physics and science, that resistance is the energy between two things.

So that's when I started using that analogy. Like if you pick up the rubber band, there's no resistance in the rubber band, you know, it's when we pull on it and it's, and then I started talking about, you know, if I pump my fist together and smash my fist together, that's resistance. What I'd say is that it takes two things.

So there is no such thing as a resistant individual, by definition, it is the energy between two things. And for me, that really helped my brain start to evolve of [00:03:00] understanding what causes resistance and what reduces resistance, which makes it easier to navigate resistance in dialogue. I think the thing that's so interesting with different populations that I've worked with.

Is that there's so many things we do to try to manipulate or control people to bring down their resista...