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When faced with creating change, we all tend to think of resistance to change as coming from the system or systems. In fact, many of the most important barriers to change will come from you, from your own thoughts and feelings. These are your internal resistance.

What are these barriers? Here are some typical thoughts that will almost certainly result in no changes:

	My boss will never go for this
	This will result in more work for my co-workers
	Everyone will be mad at /cross with me
	No one has ever done anything like this before
	What right do I have to do something different from everyone else?
	I’ll feel guilty if I have it better thane everyone else

The common denominator of all these statements of internal resistance is simple: they are all externally focused. They say, in effect, that I can’t do what I want to do and what I feel is right for me because someone else would fee unhappy about it. This is one of the hallmarks of stress. As long as your concern is primarily with what others think or will think, you will indeed be stuck.

Our experience in helping clients identify what they really want and then take action is that as long as you are externally focused you won’t be able to see most of the real options available to you. On the other hand, the clearer you are about your goals and priorities and the more clearly you state them – to yourself and to others – the more options you will see.

Find your own resistances. Find the statements you make to yourself that keep you stuck In most cases, these will be statements that are focused outside of yourself like the list above. It might well be that the most powerful internal resistances to change come right out of your family of origin.

All of us learn how to work in systems from our family systems. When we grow up, we join systems that fit us, so it makes sense that we would resist change with tactics that we learned in our original family system. A simple and useful way to find out what kind of influence your family of origin might have on your resistances to change is by interviewing them.

As you become aware of internal resistances, write them down in a notebook, don’t let them just circulate in your mind. When you write them down, you start to gain some distance and control over them, and they will stop influencing your behavior and decisions so much.

The more you pin down your resistances, and the more you write them down in your notebook, the less power they will have over you. The central key to creating real change is working out what you really want in the first place. When you learn to focus on this to guide your decisions, rather than focus on what you think others want you to do, you will be on your way.

The group/s you belong to – any groups – resist changes. Groups include any social system you are part of – family, work, religious, hobbies, whatever. Systems do not react well to change. First, the system tries to keep roles and relationships the same. If a person in the system tries to change, the system works subtly to move that person back in line. If faced with the threat of real change, systems work more overtly to return things to normal.

Sometimes systems exert this pressure crudely and powerfully. Often people in systems feel angry when someone challenges the system’s rules. It is important to keep in mind that if you decide that you can have more choices in life than you felt before, this throws a challenge up to everyone else in your systems. If you have more choices, then maybe they do, too. Rather than look at that rather frightening thought, sometimes it’s easier to convince the errant member that he or she really doesn’t have any other choices.

For systems the final solution is to reject. Throw the heretic out. Hire someone else who fits. Divorce. But systems will adjust if they have to. If a person changes and stays, the system must change. It must eventually adjust to the new information. Wives and children can adjust to having more active and present husband and father. Organizations can adjust to a different style you may introduce in management even to new possibilities you may introduce by the way you change yourself.

Systems can become more open. That is, they can accept that more options available, and the can become more responsive to new information from the environment. No system is totally open—if it didn’t have rules, it would not be a system. Many systems are highly rigid and closed, but all human systems must be at least somewhat open to new information to survive.

The most difficult obstacle facing people who want to set their own courses in life is the power of systems to control their thoughts, feelings, and actions—even when it runs counter to self-interest. Once a person has gathered and integrated enough information about himself or herself, once he or she has started to chart a course, it is time to go to the beginning of the systems that resist changes: the family of origin.

Going Back to the Family—Why and How: You can learn crucial information, like both Joseph and Mitchell, clients of ours. They each learned crucial information, information that helped them in standing up to pressure from their systems, by interviewing their parents.

How does this work? Why would asking your father and mother about what they did and thought when they were teenagers have anything to do with you now? Don’t you know that stuff already? And would they talk to you about it anyway?

Interviewing your parents, if you have done the right preparation, can be a fascinating experience. It can help you to see yourself and your systems in a new perspective, one that is outside usual channels.

The most difficult problem you will face in doing family interviews will be setting them up in such a way that you really move outside your usual interactions. The interactions must be different to be effective in giving you new information to take back to your systems. It is also important to be ready for the interviews. It’s tempting to feel that if this is the most powerful exercise, then let’s just do this one and be done with it. But all that comes before is crucial to conducting your family interviews. Preparation helps you understand what is unique about you and your career.

In interviewing your parents, your goal is to learn to see them as distinct from what your system has taught you to see, and thereby to see yourself distinctly as well. You may see your parents very differently and pick up valuable clues. We will help you with tips on whom to interview, when to interview them, how to set up the interview, what you talk about and integration of what you learn. We will also help you identify your inner resistance.