My mentor always told me he would rather people were either hot or cold toward him, not lukewarm. You cannot do much with lukewarm response, but you can use challenge and opposition to advantage.

Some weeks the same topic keeps coming up in a number of different coaching sessions. Last week it was leaders learning, sometimes the hard way, how to meet opposition from a colleague.

The key word here is “meet.” Most people get into trouble by failing to meet what the person is actually bringing to them. Instead they avoid the person’s energy by trying to pacify, correct or fix it. Often that just makes things worse. What works for me is to recognize the emotion the person is experiencing, see where the challenge is coming from, and meet them there.

Most of us are hesitant to meet people with a strong pushback. Understandably so; as leaders or experts, we are careful with the power differential derived from our position and, if the person is coming from pain, low esteem or self-protection, coming on strong clearly doesn’t help. There are different ways to meet each of those three types creatively, which we may touch on in future postings. The coaching in these recent sessions, however, was about meeting people who were bringing their challenge in a feisty, aggressive way.

It is easy enough to recognize when opposition is coming from this kind of energy. The language will be clean and direct, not veiled or pained. You will probably feel some feistiness rising in yourself. Under the issue the person is bringing, you will often notice it is really about them finding their place. They want to play, to contribute more in some way, and they’re looking for a way in.

Typically such people got told along the way that they don’t really matter. They are used to being dismissed or overpowered and are wrestling this demon right now with the current authority figure in their life: you. What a golden opportunity. You can let them know, finally, how much they do matter. Avoiding their energy, even meeting it with all the gentle kindness of a saint, won’t give them that. You have to be willing to fight a little, to engage but in a way that leaves them getting a win, so they end up honored for the truth they are seeking to bring and feel they have a place to give their gift.

The more willing we are to meet opposition, the more we will find ourselves surrounded by strong people engaging in a genuinely loyal and creative way.

Many people instinctively feel they don’t have their full power and energy available to them. In coaching work, we see where huge amounts of personal resource get locked away and work with clients to make this energy available again in their lives.

For many of us this shows up as the voice of negative self-judgment, the voice inside that tells us we aren’t doing it right, we’re not good enough or worse. Along the way the best we can do is cope with the voice of negative self-judgment by muffling it and keeping it in the background as much as possible. We see it as a wound we wish we could get rid of, while knowing we never can.

For some of us, there comes a time when an opportunity rises to stop pushing it away and make this wound conscious. We may be shocked to discover how much of our energy is absorbed in this voice.

Recently, I was working with a client who had the courage to walk into the full force of her negative self-judgment. We set up a process so that this voice could be seen for what it is and then invited her to embody its energy. It is extraordinary to witness a relatively timid person opening to full throttle and reclaiming her power.

The old energy would harshly crush what it judged as not up to the mark. That same energy, now reclaimed, is the determination to make previously impossible changes in her living situation and to live life full out.

I so appreciate those who are courageous enough to take this life-changing journey.

Our most creative endeavors are motivated by vision. Much of the time, however, we are motivated by standards. Standards are ideals about how we should be. “I should be more kind, more successful” or whatever. Standards come from the past; usually the expectations of those we have loved and admired. Typically, standards point us to what is wrong, how we are not living up to our ideals of who we should be.

Recently, we were working on this with a client. He was willing to take five minutes a day for two weeks to contemplate and list all the standards he was trying to live up to. Quite a revelation! He saw how much these things were running him—ideals he could never satisfy—and how much stress it was taking to live in this constant state of shame.

Now, recognizing this, he is free to perceive his vision. Whereas standards tend to point us to what is wrong, vision has the feeling of possibility. Vision sees everything about us and our present situation as the perfect starting point and creates according to our true desire. While we may not suddenly eradicate all standards from our lives, being conscious of the trap they present frees us to find the aliveness of living from vision.