Most executive coaches have worked with a leader who sincerely wants to change and somehow cannot. The commitment is real, the plan is sensible, and the leader can often describe exactly what needs to happen. Months later, the same behaviors remain firmly in place. Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey spent years studying this pattern, and their findings reshaped how many coaches understand resistance. What looks like a failure of will, they argue, is usuall