Early in my career, I believed resistance was the enemy of coaching. Something to wear down. Something that meant I’d failed. Now, after more than two decades and a new book on the subject, I believe almost the opposite: resistance is one of coaching’s richest openings.
The idea that reoriented my practice is deceptively simple: problems of change are problems of learning. When a teacher won’t change, something is in the way of their learning—and learning problems can be solved. It sounds like a small reframe, but it changes how I show up: instead of bracing against a resistant teacher, I get curious about what they are trying to learn and what is making it hard.
What follows are seven ideas from my new book, How to Coach Resistance: Turning Pushback Into Possibility (Jossey-Bass, 2026) that explore what that shift makes possible. None of the ideas is a technique, exactly. Each is more of a shift in how to see the person across from you—and in coaching, how you see someone shapes what becomes possible between you.
1. Resistance Is the Tip of an Iceberg
The arguing, the “yes, but,” the polite agreement that goes nowhere from a teacher you are coaching: that’s the visible part of something much larger. Beneath the surface sit emotions, unmet needs, fears, and histories you cannot see. When a teacher crosses their arms and says the new initiative won’t work, the objection is real—and it’s rarely the whole story. If we coach only the behavior on the surface, we coach the wrong thing, and we usually make the behavior worse.
The more skillful move is to get curious. Rather than countering the objection with a better argument, I try to wonder aloud: “I’m curious what’s underneath this for you. What are you worried might happen?” Approached this way, resistance becomes a doorway into what a teacher is actually experiencing—and the conversation you most need to have is usually the one on the other side of it.
2. You Are Half of the Resistance
We tend to speak about resistance as something a teacher has, like a fever we can measure from across the desk. In truth, resistance is relational. It forms in the space between two people, which means the teacher I’ve found most resistant over the years has usually been the one I was most activated by. I remember a teacher whose every yes, but made my jaw tighten; only later did I see that my own tension was feeding hers. My own frustration narrows my vision, and then I mistake that narrowed vision for objective observation.
When a teacher doesn’t follow through, we assume they won’t. More often, they can’t—at least not yet.
This is the least comfortable idea in the book, and also the most freeing, because your half of the dynamic is the half you can actually change. Before I decide a teacher is resistant, I ask myself a few honest questions: What am I feeling right now? Where is my own fear? Have I ever behaved the way this person is behaving? The answers soften me. And a softer coach almost always meets less resistance.
3. Meet the Emotion Before the Problem
Under most resistance is a feeling. It might be frustration, or fear of looking incompetent, or grief for the way teaching used to feel. If you go straight to problem solving, that unaddressed feeling keeps pulling the conversation off-course and you find yourself wondering why such a reasonable teacher won’t accept help.
My ACE framework offers a sequence for these moments: Acknowledge emotions, Cultivate compassion, Expand the story. The order is the whole point—you begin with the emotion. A simple question opens things up: “What’s coming up for you as we talk about this?” Then stay, without rushing to fix, long enough for the teacher to feel heard. Only once a feeling is named and accepted does a person’s thinking become flexible again. Coaches often fear this will open a floodgate. In my experience, naming an emotion is what allows it to settle. The floodgate we fear rarely opens. What opens instead is the teacher’s willingness to think alongside us.
4. “Won’t” and “Can’t” Look Identical
When a teacher doesn’t follow through, we assume they won’t. More often, they can’t—at least not yet. My Gaps Framework names what might actually be in the way: a gap in skill, knowledge, capacity, or will. These four look the same from the outside, and they call for entirely different responses. You cannot reteach your way out of a skill gap, and you cannot rest your way out of a capacity gap. A teacher who nods along in a workshop and then never uses the strategy may understand the idea perfectly and have no idea how to enact it on a Tuesday with 32 students in the room. That’s a skill gap wearing the costume of agreement.
Before you decide how to respond, diagnose what you’re seeing. The response follows from the diagnosis: a will gap invites a conversation about values and choice, a skill gap calls for modeling and practice, and a capacity gap asks us to lighten the load before we ask for anything new. Accurate diagnosis is itself an act of care, because you can’t respond well to a problem you’ve misnamed.
5. Some Resistance Is Wisdom
Not every act of resistance is a problem to solve. A teacher who pushes back against a mandate that harms children, or a curriculum that erases their students’ culture, may be the most principled person in the building. Coaches can fall into a trap here: we treat all resistance as something to move past, and we accidentally coach people toward compliance with things they ought to question. When we widen the lens to include power, identity, and the systems we work within, some resistance starts to look like integrity.
When resistance appears, we get to choose how we meet it: with force or with love.
The coaching move in these moments is to honor what the teacher is protecting and help them channel it—to turn a clenched no into a clear-eyed choice about where to spend their energy. Coaching that only ever smooths resistance away can end up serving whoever holds power. Part of our work is knowing the difference between resistance that guards something precious and resistance that guards the status quo.
6. Depletion Wears the Mask of Resistance
Right now, the most common thing I see mistaken for resistance is plain exhaustion. A depleted teacher disengages in meetings, doesn’t try the new strategy, and says, “I’ll get to it” without ever getting to it. From across the room, that looks like defiance. Up close, it’s depletion. And depletion does not respond to the tools we usually reach for. You cannot coach someone out of an empty tank, and adding one more strategy to an overwhelmed person’s plate only deepens the shutdown.
I’ve learned to ask a depleted teacher a different kind of question: “What would it look like to take one thing off your plate this week?” The most skillful move available is often to help a teacher subtract—to protect an hour, remove a task, say out loud that what we’re asking of educators right now is, in many places, more than a person can sustain. Sometimes the most effective coaching looks like helping someone set something down.
7. In the End, It Comes Down to Love
Every idea here rests on a single stance. When resistance appears, we get to choose how we meet it: with force or with love—with the belief that the person in front of us is whole, capable, and doing the best they can. There is nothing soft about this. Meeting resistance with love is the most rigorous thing a coach can do, because it asks us to stay open at the exact moment we want to defend, explain, or push. Force can produce compliance for a while. Love creates the conditions in which a person can actually change. This is why, after everything I know about strategy and framework and technique, my book ends with two words: choose love.
The next time resistance shows up in your coaching, pause before you push against it. Get curious about what’s beneath it, examine your half of it, and ask whether it might be a gap, exhaustion, or even wisdom. And remember that the teacher in front of you is trying to learn something genuinely hard. That, more than anything, is where the coaching begins.
