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Avoiding Trainer Defensiveness
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
——Oscar Wilde, playwright
Like resistance in participants, defensiveness in trainers is a protective strategy to ward off anticipated, perceived, or real attacks. It’s an effort to guard yourself against actual or imagined criticism, injury to your ego, or exposure of your shortcomings. People don’t plan to be defensive—it just seems to pop out of them. Even so, as you’ll see in this chapter, there’s much you can do to manage your defensiveness effectively.
Being human, we all have our defensive moments; to some degree we resemble the New Testament lawyer who, “desiring to justify himself, said . . .”1
Each of us has been somewhat defensive all our ...
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