🕒 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. ...

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

One conversation can change everything.

The phone rings. You expect just another call. Instead, a single sentence shatters your reality—your future, rewritten in an instant.

You can’t always control what happens. But you can always control what comes next. I don’t just believe this—I’ve lived it.

When Life Throws a Curveball

Twenty years ago, I thought I was on the right path. Then, out of nowhere, I lost my job. One conversation and it was gone—the career I had built was erased in an instant.

At first, I froze. My mind raced with worst-case scenarios. The panic was so consuming that I got lost on my drive home—on a route I had driven for over five years. That’s how disoriented I was. The weight of uncertainty was crushing.

But then, through the noise of my thoughts, a single realization broke through:

I still have a choi...