EXERCISE 4.1
Emotional Expression
Expressing Resistance
Purpose
To help individuals develop effective ways of resisting requests that do not seem as well founded as they need to be.
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25 minutes
This exercise will help leaders and team members answer the questions, “How do you know when to push back, and how much?” and “In what way to do so?”
Outcomes
- Improving understanding of how to express emotions in challenging situations
- To have several ways of politely but effectively resisting requests that are emotionally and/or rationally unintelligent
Audience
- Intact teams
- Unaffiliated group
- Individual working with a coach
Facilitator Competencies 
Moderate
Materials
- Expressing Resistance Handout
Time Matrix
| Activity | Estimated Time |
| Describe the strategies | 10 minutes |
| In pairs, apply one each | 10 minutes |
| Debrief | 5 minutes |
| Total Time | 25 minutes |
Instructions
1. Distribute the Expressing Resistance Handout and discuss the following with your participants. There will be times in everyone’s career when he or she is requested to take actions that may seem rational from one point of view but equally irrational from another. When it really is a rational request, there is probably an information gap involved in the situation; however, often a lack of emotional reality testing also contributes to the mixed feelings. This could be, for example, because a person doesn’t want to disappoint/confront his or her boss’s unrealistic expectations. Review each of the ways to push back respectfully and effectively provided on the handout.
2. Ask participants to form pairs and experiment with the strategies by applying one to a situation in each of their lives. The person who goes first will briefly explain the situation and then practice using the strategy he or she chooses as if the situation is current. Then the pair should discuss the likely success of that strategy. Then the second person follows the process, and again the pair should discuss what is likely to happen.
3. Bring the full group together to debrief their experience and insights.
The following are some ways to push back respectfully and effectively. Choose one that might work in a situation you are in now or have experienced in the past and discuss with your partner how the method could work for you. Then trade and the other person picks a method to discuss.
- Offer an Exclamation! Often a great way to challenge someone’s enthusiasm for the impossible right out of the box is simply to start with an exclamation such as, “Wow, that’s optimistic!” Or you might say “Gee that sounds pretty ambitious!” This part of the communication can sound a little incredulous, but follow it up with a respectfully curious tonality and ask, “Can you tell me about the details?” This lets the person know you’re not completely on board at the very beginning.
- Reflective Listening. This could be the next step or an independent step in the intervention. It is a simple and powerful one. Use good reflective listening skills to make sure you heard the person correctly. For instance, “Okay, so if I hear you correctly, you don’t think draining the swamp with the alligators still in it will pose any serious problems for the team, even though we are only being given shovels to get the job done.” In addition to serving to clarify accurate understanding, this can be an invitation to do better reality testing and is accomplished through changes in your tonality depending on what words you emphasize. Try it using several different kinds of tonal emphasis.
- Challenging the Assumptions. If you hear something like, “No, that shouldn’t be a problem” or “Well, there’s hardly any gators out there anymore,” you can reply enthusiastically, “So you don’t think we’ll run into any problems?” And when the person reassuringly says “No,” you can counter with (hesitantly, of course): “But what if there are?” Pause for a moment here, and if there is no reply you can shift the table a little bit by asking, “What I guess I’m asking is, if there were any problems, what do you think we might run into?” This objectifies the problem and appeals to the person’s managerial expertise, so for the moment it’s not an emotional confrontation. It puts you on the same side because you’re asking, “What do you think WE might run into?” At this point, if he or she is honest, he or she will begin to explore some concrete issues. If the person is only partially honest, he or she will probably invite you to suggest problems that you might anticipate. But don’t take this bait or you can be seen as a whiner, a pessimist, a naysayer, or insubordinate. Simply say, “I really have no idea, but you would probably understand that better than I do.”
- Covering Your Bases. If the person is still unwilling to be honest or realistic, you can simply say, “I guess we just disagree on the way we’re seeing this. It seems unrealistic to me, and I’m just afraid if we don’t think it through more carefully we’re going to run into some serious problems.” Your tonality here will be critical. It’s often best to deliver this with as light an emotional charge as possible. You want this to come off as a rational cautionary remark, not an emotional warning that challenges the other person’s authority. In any case he or she has been warned, you have done the best you can, and if there are problems you can say, “Wow, I was worried we might run into something like this” (not “I told you so!”).