🕒 Reading time: 6–7 minutes

By William F. Nazzaro, founder of The Time to Lead Institute, leadership expert, and trusted advisor to leaders navigating transformation and cultural change.

📣 This piece is designed to be shared with leadership teams, change agents, and culture champions. Use it in conversations, coaching sessions, or offsites where resistance shows up—and clarity is needed.

If you’ve ever tried to lead real change, you already know resistance doesn’t just show up—it escalates.
In Part 1, we unpacked the four predictable stages: ignore, ridicule, attack, and dilute.
Now, it’s time to turn inward toward what it takes to keep going when things get hard.

This part is about staying anchored, protecting your integrity, and learning to navigate resistance as it shows up in people, not just in processes.

When It Gets Hard (And It Will)

This isn’t just professionally hard, it’s soul work. The kind that keeps you up at night, questioning if it’s worth it.

Confidence wavers. ...

⏳ Estimated Reading Time: 6–7 minutes

By William F. Nazzaro, founder of The Time to Lead Institute, leadership expert, and trusted advisor to leaders navigating transformation and cultural change.

Most change efforts fail because leaders don’t recognize what they’re actually up against. This article breaks down the four stages of resistance—and how to lead through each one without losing your clarity, your purpose, your momentum, or yourself.

Every change leader encounters it. Most don’t survive it.

There’s a pattern that shows up any time someone dares to shift how things work inside an organization.

This isn’t covered in any manual—but if you’ve ever challenged the status quo, you’ve felt the response.

It doesn’t discriminate by role, title, or position. The dynamic is the same. The only difference is how directly it shows up—and how hard it pushes back.

It’s resistance.

And it follows a sequence.

It starts quietly—then gets louder.

Stage 1: Ignore & Discredit

At first, it...