I was sitting across from the executive sponsor of a leadership academy I was running for a client, pitching a workshop on mindful practices. I believed in what I was saying. I had data, and more than that, I had my own story, this was the work that had changed my life completely, including a career pivot I never saw coming.
And yet I hesitated in how I shared it. She was hesitant too, but reluctantly agreed.
The day of the workshop, the group had a powerful, experiential day exploring how they show up. The pause was a powerful vehicle to support them in seeing their own patterns, their own conditioning, their own “stuff”, with enough clarity to actually do something about it. The feedback at the end: This was one of the best workshops we’ve had.
I have never forgotten that moment. And it wasn’t because their words validated the work but rather the insight I had about me and this work
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I had almost not pitched it. I had almost softened it into something easier to accept. And the reason was simple and a little embarrassing: I had held every one of those preconceived ideas before this work changed my life. I knew what it was to sit in that room of resistance. I had been that person. That is why identity work is so important and so challenging at the same time.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, pitching that workshop, I knew I had resisted this exact thing for years.
I am trained as a scientist. I spent my career in pharmaceutical marketing. Mindfulness was not in my vocabulary. When I first encountered it, I filed it under “not for me” somewhere between crystals and essential oils. Woo woo. The kind of thing people do when they can’t handle reality. I had an identity built around rigor and results, and that identity was very good at explaining why I did not need to sit still and breathe. Until it cracked me open.
I have learned to read the room. And I have learned, sometimes, to read it too well
A client once told me: “Call it mental toughness, the way the Navy SEALs do, and you’ll get more buy-in. Mindfulness sounds too soft for our people.”
So I did. And it worked, in the sense that people showed up and participated and gave it decent ratings. But something about that exchange has stayed with me, and not entirely comfortably.
Because rebranding is not the same as dissolving resistance. You can dress a disruption in familiar clothes and walk it past the gate, but if the identity of the learner never gets touched, the disruption stops at the surface. People will engage with the technique and leave the conditioning intact. They will practice the pause and still not look at what the pause is revealing.
And I knew something about those participants that they did not yet know about themselves. I had been one of them. I had said “our people aren’t like that.” I had reached for exactly the mental toughness frame, to protect myself from the vulnerability of actually trying something that might require me to be different.
I acquiesced. And I understand why. Getting something into the room matters. Meeting people where they are is not a betrayal of the work. But I want to sit with the honest cost of the accommodation: when we translate a practice into something that sounds safe enough to try, we sometimes strip out the very thing that makes it work. The edge is the point. The discomfort is necessary. When we sand it smooth enough that no one flinches, we may have made it frictionless in exactly the wrong places.
Here is what I have come to understand after years of doing this work and living it myself: resistance is not irrational. It is identity-protective. The identity that got you here has a strong survival drive. It has a track record. It has evidence. It built a career, a reputation, a self-concept that works, at least by the metrics it has always used to measure working. And it knows, at some level, that growth is a threat to that self. So it builds stories. This is woo woo. This is soft. This is not how serious professionals operate. I don’t have time for this. This is not who I am.
Those stories are evidence of exactly how much the identity has at stake.
The practices that changed my life, sitting with discomfort, slowing down enough to notice what I was actually thinking and feeling, learning to pause before reacting rather than after, felt threatening because they were. They threatened the version of me that ran fast, performed certainty, and had confused busyness with effectiveness. That version of me was completely convinced she was fine. She had a very convincing story about why she was fine.
Resistance is the identity holding its ground. It is the self doing exactly what it was built to do: protect what it knows from what it doesn’t. The problem is that what it knows is also what is keeping you stuck. The same conditioning that made you effective at one level becomes the ceiling at the next. This is why you can know something is good for you and still not do it. Why you can have the data, the research, the testimonials of people you respect, and still file it under “not for me.” The knowing lives in the mind. The resistance lives deeper. It lives in the identity, in the body, in the story of who you are and what kind of person does or does not do this kind of thing. Logic does not reach it. Information does not dissolve it. Only experience, the kind that disrupts rather than confirms, has a chance.
I have never liked being in the seat of disruption. I have spent my career on the other side of the table, creating the conditions for transformation in other people. I have built frameworks for it, trained leaders in it, written about it. I know the research. I know the theory. I know what becomes possible on the other side.
And I still feel the pull toward what is comfortable. I still notice when I am reaching for the story that lets me off the hook. I still catch myself, sometimes, pitching something with one hand while holding it at arm’s length with the other. That is what unlearning actually looks like from the inside.
Here is the thing about sitting in that discomfort seat: you do not get to fully appreciate what it asks of people until you have been asked yourself. I understood mindfulness intellectually long before it changed me. I could have explained the neuroscience. I could have cited the studies. But explanation is not transformation.
What shifted was a moment of genuine contact with the experience itself, when I could not explain my way out of what I was noticing and could not run fast enough to stay ahead of it. The disruption found me in a gap. And in that gap, something moved
I think about that every time I sit across from someone who is smart, accomplished, and absolutely certain this is not for them. I recognize the certainty. I know what it is built on. And I know that arguing with it will only make it stronger, because the identity doubles down when it feels threatened. What it cannot double down against is its own direct experience.
The question I get asked most often and the one I asked myself for years, is some version of: how do I make this easier? And the honest answer is that easier is not really the goal. The goal is to build enough relationship with your own discomfort that you stop treating it as a stop sign.
Resistance, when you get curious about it rather than satisfied by it, becomes one of the most useful pieces of data you have. The places you pull away from hardest are almost always the places worth staying with because that pull is the identity telling you something is at stake. And when something is at stake, you are close to something real.
The POCA Model (Pause, Observe, Choose, Act) is designed for exactly this. As a way of creating a moment between the stimulus and the response where something other than conditioning gets to speak. The Pause is the act of refusing to let the automatic win by default. The Observe step is where you meet your resistance directly: what am I feeling? What story am I running? What identity is driving this reaction? What do I believe is at stake?
Most people skip straight from stimulus to action and call it decisive. What they have actually done is let the conditioning choose for them, and then claimed credit for the choice.
The work is to slow down enough to see that.
I think about the participants who got the “mental toughness” framing. Some of them found their way to the real thing anyway. Something landed, they went looking, and the experience eventually found a gap in the armor. Others walked away with a useful technique they may deploy strategically, which is valuable but not the same as transformation
The difference, in my experience, is almost never about the technique. It is about whether the person decides to get curious about their own resistance rather than satisfied by it. Whether they are willing, even slightly, to hold their certainty loosely enough that something new has room to enter.
You do not have to call it mindfulness. You do not have to agree that it will work for you before you try it. You do not have to abandon the part of you that needs evidence before it believes anything, that part has served you, and it deserves respect.
But you do have to get honest about what you are defending and why. You have to be willing to look at the story you are using to stay where you are, and ask whether it is actually true, or whether it is just familiar.
The thing that changed my life was not the practice itself. It was the moment I stopped being so certain that I already knew what I needed. That small opening, that willingness to be wrong about myself, was the beginning of everything that came after.
What is the thing you have been circling, for months, maybe years, knowing somewhere that it might matter? The one you have explained away more times than you can count?