If you’ve been doing creative work for any length of time, you’ve already met resistance in its many forms. The client who wants you to “make it pop” without explaining what that means. The collaborator who thinks your strongest idea is actually your weakest. That nagging voice in your head that says you’re not good enough, experienced enough, or talented enough to pull this off.
Resistance shows up uninvited, and it rarely plays fair. But here’s what most people don’t realise: learning to work with resistance, rather than against it, is what separates creatives who burn out from those who build sustainable practices. It’s not about developing thicker skin or learning to ignore criticism. It’s about getting smarter at recognising what deserves your attention and what doesn’t.
Distinguish between useful feedback and noise
The hardest part about recieving pushback is that it all sounds equally urgent in the moment. A client’s concern feels as weighty as a mentor’s insight, which feels as crushing as an internet stranger’s hot take. Your brain treats all of it as threat-level information, and suddenly you’re drowning in other people’s opinions about your work.
Learning to sort signal from noise takes practice. Useful feedback usually comes with specificity. It points to concrete elements in your work and explains why they’re not landing. “This colour palette feels off for the brand’s audience” is feedback you can work with. “I don’t like it” is noise masquerading as critique.
Pay attention to the source as well. Does this person understand what you’re trying to achieve? Do they have expertise in this area? Are they invested in your success, or are they projecting their own anxieties and preferences onto your work? These questions aren’t about dismissing criticism, they’re about context. The same comment from different people carries different weight, and pretending otherwise is how you end up redesigning something perfectly good into mediocrity.
Sometimes the most valuable pushback comes from unexpected places. A junior team member might spot something everyone else missed. Your mum, who knows nothing about design, might articulate why something feels wrong even if she can’t explain it in technical terms. Stay open, but stay discerning.
Don’t defend, explore
When someone challenges your creative decisions, every instinct in your body screams at you to justify what you’ve done. You want to explain your process, cite your references, prove that you know what you’re doing. This is a completely natural response, and it’s almost always the wrong move.
Defence mode shuts down conversation. It positions you and the other person as adversaries rather than collaborators. You’re so busy protecting your choices that you stop listening to what they’re actually saying, and they’re so busy trying to be heard that they dig deeper into their position. Everyone loses.
Try this instead: get genuinely curious about their perspective. “Tell me more about what’s not working for you” opens up space for real dialogue. So does “What would you like to see instead?” or “Help me understand what you’re responding to here.” These aren’t weak questions. They’re strategic ones.
Often, what someone says they object to isn’t the real issue. A client might say your logo design is “too modern” when what they really mean is they’re nervous about how their traditional customer base will react. A collaborator might criticise your concept when they’re actually feeling left out of the creative process. When you explore rather than defend, you often discover the actual problem, which is usually solvable in ways the surface complaint isn’t.
This doesn’t mean you roll over and accept every piece of feedback as gospel. It means you’re gathering information before you decide how to respond. You’re staying in control of the conversation instead of letting your ego run the show.
Know your non-negotiables
Every experienced creative eventually develops a sense of what they’re willing to compromise on and what they’ll walk away from a project over. This isn’t about being difficult or precious, it’s about understanding your own values and creative principles well enough to recognise when they’re being violated.
Your non-negotiables might be ethical. Maybe you won’t work on projects that contradict your values, or you won’t put your name on work that’s been watered down beyond recognition. They might be practical: you won’t work without a contract, you won’t do unlimited revisions, you won’t start work before the deposit clears. They might be creative: you won’t plagiarise someone else’s style, you won’t compromise on accessibility standards, you won’t cut corners that damage the integrity of the final piece.
The tricky part is distinguishing between a genuine non-negotiable and you being stubborn about something that doesn’t actually matter that much. Is this element truly essential to your vision, or have you just fallen in love with your first idea? Are you protecting the work, or are you protecting your ego?
This is where self-awareness becomes your most valuable tool. The creatives who thrive long-term are the ones who can tell the difference between flexibility and compromise. They know when to fight for something and when to let it go gracefully. They understand that sometimes the client’s “bad” idea actually works better than their “good” one, and that’s okay.
Having clarity on your boundaries makes resistance less destabilising. When you know what you stand for, other people’s pushback becomes information rather than crisis. You can evaluate it calmly instead of feeling like everything is up for negotiation every single time.
Build your confidence muscle
Confidence in your creative work isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build through repetition, study, and accumulated experience. The more you know your craft, the less other people’s doubt can shake you.
This doesn’t mean becoming arrogant or dismissive of feedback. It means trusting your creative judgement enough to evaluate criticism on its merits rather than accepting it automatically because someone else sounds more certain than you feel. It means knowing that you’ve put in the work, that you understand the principles underlying your decisions, and that you’re capable of adapting when genuinely better solutions present themselves.
Building this kind of confidence requires consistent practice. You have to make work, lots of it, including work that fails. You have to study your field deeply enough to understand not only what works but why it works. You have to pay attention to your own development and notice when you’re getting stronger at something that used to challenge you.
It also helps to cultivate a practice of documenting your creative decisions as you make them. When you can articulate why you chose this typeface, this composition, this narrative structure, you’re less vulnerable to vague criticism. You’ve done the thinking, you know your reasoning, and that knowledge is armour against the kind of pushback that’s really about someone else’s insecurity or lack of understanding.
The confidence you’re building here isn’t about being right all the time. It’s about trusting yourself to navigate uncertainty, to recover from mistakes, and to make sound creative decisions even when you don’t have all the answers. That’s the kind of confidence that actually sustains a creative practice over years and decades.
Choose your battles
You cannot fight every piece of criticism that comes your way. If you try, you’ll exhaust yourself and damage relationships that might otherwise be productive. Part of professional maturity is learning when to engage with pushback and when to simply acknowledge it and move on.
Some resistance is worth addressing because it points to a genuine problem in your work. Some is worth addressing because the relationship matters and working through disagreement strengthens it. Some is worth addressing because it helps you clarify your thinking, even if you don’t ultimately change anything.
But some resistance is noise. It’s someone having a bad day and taking it out on your work. It’s someone who doesn’t understand what you’re doing and isn’t interested in learning. It’s someone who would criticise anything you created because criticism makes them feel important. You don’t owe these situations your emotional energy.
The skill here is discernment. Can you tell the difference between pushback that deserves thoughtful engagement and pushback that deserves a polite acknowledgement and nothing more? Can you protect your creative energy by choosing where to invest it?
This becomes especially important when you’re working with difficult clients or in high-pressure environments. If you treat every comment as equally worthy of deep consideration, you’ll never finish anything. You have to prioritise. You have to make strategic decisions about where to push back yourself and where to accept imperfect solutions because the alternative is endless conflict.
Sometimes the most professional response to criticism is to say, “I hear what you’re saying, I’ve given it careful thought, and I’m proceeding as planned.” Not defensively, not aggressively. As a simple statement of professional judgement. That’s not being difficult, that’s being decisive.
Create space for your own resistance
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: sometimes the resistance isn’t coming from outside at all. Sometimes it’s you, sabotaging your own progress in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Procrastinating on the project you supposedly care about. Finding endless reasons why now isn’t quite the right time to launch. Picking fights with clients or collaborators because conflict feels safer than completion.
Internal resistance is slippery because it disguises itself as legitimate concerns. You tell yourself you’re being perfectionist when you’re actually being afraid. You call it “waiting for inspiration” when you’re really avoiding the discomfort of doing difficult work. You frame it as protecting your creative integrity when you’re actually protecting yourself from the possibility of failure.
This kind of resistance deserves attention, not judgement. If you notice yourself consistently avoiding a certain type of work, or sabotaging projects at particular stages, that’s information. What are you afraid of? What feels threatening about moving forward? What’s the cost, real or imagined, of succeeding at this?
Sometimes the fear is concrete. You’re worried about negative feedback, financial instability, or not being good enough. Sometimes it’s more abstract, a kind of existential anxiety about what it means to put yourself and your work out into the world. Either way, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. It just means it continues to run your creative practice from the shadows.
Getting curious about your own resistance patterns takes courage. It means being honest about the ways you get in your own way. But this kind of self-awareness is what allows you to work with your psychology rather than constantly fighting against it. You start to recognise your patterns early enough to interrupt them. You develop strategies that account for your tendencies rather than pretending they don’t exist.
Moving forward with resistance
Resistance never completely disappears from creative work. As long as you’re making things that matter, putting your ideas into the world, and working with other humans, you’ll encounter pushback, both external and internal. The goal isn’t to eliminate it, that’s impossible. The goal is to get better at working with it.
The creatives who build sustainable practices aren’t the ones who never face resistance. They’re the ones who’ve learned to metabolise it, to extract what’s useful and discard what isn’t, to stay grounded in their own judgement while remaining genuinely open to growth. They understand that resistance is part of the process, not a sign that something has gone wrong.
This is learnable. You get better at it by paying attention, by noticing what kinds of pushback tend to destabilise you and why, by watching how other experienced creatives handle similar challenges. You get better at it by staying in the game long enough to see patterns, to recognise that the client who seems impossibly difficult today is remarkably similar to the client you successfully navigated six months ago.
Your creative practice will evolve as you do. The resistance you face will change as your work becomes more ambitious, as your profile rises, as you take on more complex projects. But the core skills, discernment, curiosity, self-awareness, strategic thinking, these remain constant. They’re what allow you to keep making meaningful work regardless of what kind of pushback you encounter along the way.
