My Journey from Tech Resistance to Embrace: How Reluctance Became Transformation

The Initial Resistance

My journey with technology has been one of reluctant transformation. From actively avoiding coding in high school to eventually embracing technology as a tool for human connection and efficiency, I've discovered that my initial resistance was preventing me from accessing a world of possibility. Here's how that change happened.

My senior year, I had a free period I needed to fill. Flipping through the course catalog, I stumbled upon a C++ coding class. My friend Alex had been coding video games in his basement for months and it seemed like magic—the kind I wanted to learn. With visions of creating the next King’s Quest, I signed up, unaware this would solidify a habit of dismissing technology that would take years to resolve.

Arriving to class the first day, I knew I had made a mistake. There were a few things that should have tipped me off:

• It was an independent study course. I was handed a book and told to walk through the lessons on the computer.
• My expectation was that coding would show visible progress like drawing does. Instead, coding all looks the same no matter how much you work on it.
• It's detail-oriented. As a high school kid, there were only a few things I cared about—none of them were details.

As soon as I sat down, next to a friend who was stoked about the class, I looked for another class. I don't remember what I ended up taking, just knew that coding wasn't for me. I placed technology at arm's length and moved on with my life.

Technology at Arm's Length: Living with but Not Owning Technology

From that moment forward, I saw technology as something outside of myself—something I've interacted with but never owned.

It was the same approach I had with my body. I interact with the world through my body, but it's only recently that I've taken any kind of ownership with it, finally paying attention to how my body feels, moves, and changes with different circumstances.

Similarly, I am attached to technology. It's a part of my everyday life. My lights automatically turn on in the morning and off in the evening. We only stream our visual entertainment. My phone is never far out of reach. When the internet is down, I can't do 90% of my work. Compared to my grandparents, I would appear to be the bionic man.

The Turning Point: Building a CRM from Scratch

This shift in my perspective of technology started 10 months ago when we began onboarding new software at work. The goal was to completely digitize our business processes. If you've ever been lucky enough to work at a small institution or company, you'll know what it's like to wear many hats.

Ten months ago, I put on the hat of building the new CRM. I am not alone; there is a small team. But the dynamics put me into a leadership position. I got to work learning how to implement new software and build out the business workflows I was envisioning.

This steep learning curve was like looking at the man behind the curtain. These back-end processes that I had skipped over out of disinterest I became interested in out of necessity.

I could see how this new software could change the way the office functioned. I saw how it could make things easier for everyone. I saw it as a tool rather than another thing to wrestle with in order to get the work done.

When technology works, creating a seamless experience that removes the drudgery of the work and opens up the path to enjoyment, it's a game changer.

As I looked around at life after the pandemic, when such an event caused so many of us to embrace and integrate technology into our everyday lives, I could see a path I hadn't seen before.

This path was remarkably similar to when I lost my teaching job—a time that very much felt like the boats were burning in the bay, and the only way through was to figure out how my theatre skills could be translated into other industries.

In theatre, I had learned how to read audiences, craft compelling narratives, and adapt quickly when things didn't go as planned. These skills translated surprisingly well to designing digital experiences that engage students and streamlined communication flows.

Just as I once crafted different experiences for different audience segments in theatre, I now design different engagement pathways for different users in our CRM.

The Choice: Resist or Embrace

The future of higher education recruitment—the future of just about everything—requires technology. Those who succeed are going to be able to create custom solutions to problems by leveraging technology.

An industry that attracted me because of its social nature (recruitment and sales) has shifted to be based in technology.

The way I saw it, I had two choices: I could either keep doing what I'm doing and hope that higher education would stay the course and I could ride the retirement wave, or I could take this opportunity to develop new skills and push myself to embrace the technology tools I had always skipped over.

I chose the latter. I'm not one for waiting or holding out. If there's something that can be done, it probably should be done. Plus, I'm a big believer that:

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The Learning Process: From Basics to Breakthrough

Part of the onboarding process for this new software was a 20-hour class that walked through the basics of how the system worked and how it could be built. I signed up and started learning.

It was a very basic course, which was good for me but awful for everyone else. It didn't really tell us or show us how to do anything. Part of the mission of the company was to create a system that was accessible to anyone no matter their experience.

My colleagues who wanted to get started building right away were frustrated about it not being helpful. For me, it was a crash course in database management—an introduction to concepts I couldn’t be bothered with.

This basic training would prove to be just the beginning of a much deeper journey into understanding not just how the software worked, but how technology has reshaped my environment.

In the process of learning how the system works, I realized how dependent the office is on software to do our work. It's central to everything we do.

This dependency is a form of technological handcuffs—a situation where we become so embedded in systems that we lose perspective on alternatives.

These handcuffs can be found outside  the office into our personal lives. We live in a time where our lives are seamlessly integrated with some form of technology, often without conscious choice or design.

This isn't forced dependence but something more subtle: unexamined reliance—which may be worse because we have the ability to do something else, yet our default is to remain on autopilot.

The difference between being controlled by technology and controlling it often comes down to one factor: whether we've taken the time to understand how it works.

This realization created a weight to the process I didn't anticipate. If my staff are going to be dependent on this software to do their work, then it better be good.

We’ve all experienced software that doesn't support our work or makes the process more difficult than it should be. I was determined to not let that happen.

The Technical Immersion: Learning by Doing

The software utilizes several different aspects of computer science that I needed to learn.

For months, I put my head down and dove head-first into learning as much as I could.

I spent hours reading articles and watching YouTube videos on topics like:

• Conditional Logic
• Databases
• Queries
• HTML
• Liquid

But more importantly, I went in and built things—a lot of things. Most of the time, things didn't work, and then I’d have to rebuild them. There were so many problems that I came across that didn't have specific instructions because they could be done dozens of different ways. This required me to solve problems rather than seek solutions.

After spending hours solving a problem, I would invite someone to look at what I had done. They would pull up the screen and see that, yes in fact, the student's application type was now showing up on their record. What they didn't see was the hours of work it took to make that happen correctly and consistently.

Good computer science is like good magic. You're not supposed to see the work that goes into creating the effect. All the audience should see is the magic, or in the case of technology—the functioning.

Key Realizations: The Power of Iteration

This process of creating and recreating led to another realization: iteration is the way through.

As much as I tried to research and work through the problem on paper, I would inevitably forget or not think of something.

Rather than trying to create a perfect solution the first time, it was far more productive to figure out a basic solution, create it, and then see how it worked in day-to-day operations.

My experience mirrors what researchers have found about technology adoption.

Studies show that initial resistance often stems from what psychologists call the "ambiguity effect"—we prefer known situations (even if imperfect) over unfamiliar ones with uncertain outcomes.

One study from MIT found that once people overcome this initial resistance and gain basic competency with a new technology, their satisfaction increases dramatically, creating a "conversion effect" where former skeptics become advocates.

I tend to get stuck in the learning stage, concerned about creating something mediocre, halting all progress. After recognizing this behavior on this project I started seeing it everywhere:

• Projects at home
• In my marriage
• With my kids
• My use of technology tools like my phone and computer
• My productivity "system"

An iterative process limits learning and gets your hands on a functional model and a potential solution. Which can be motivational fuel to keep the project going.

Functional models and potential solutions are all well and good, until the models you’ve come up with result in frustration not potential solutions. Dropping you neck deep into the mire.

The mire is part of any project, especially when learning something new. It is the tipping point of the learning process.

The Wrestling Match: Persistence and Breakthroughs

Due to my lack of software development and database management experience, I found myself in this challenging place quite a bit. It very much felt like I was wrestling with the software to try and get it to do what I wanted.

It's in this space where perseverance became valuable, but not the kind of perseverance I expected. As much as it felt like wrestling, I rarely came to any real solution through these forceful interactions.

The real breakthroughs for me came in the lull of the chaos. The solution would come after the wrestling, when I had exhausted mental energy and onto something completely different.

I would step away from the project and work and go for a walk, or cook, stack wood, letting my mind wander. It was in this space that my mind would subconsciously connect dots that eventually led to a the solution.

What shifted wasn't just my technical knowledge but my entire relationship with technology.

Previously, I saw technological tools as impositions—that demanded I adapt. With this project I began to see it as extensions of my creativity, malleable to suit my needs.

The workflows I was creating weren’t  some abstract technical exercise; it was a form of communication—with both machines and the humans who would use them.

This perspective shift transformed technology from something I tolerated into something I could shape.

Embracing technology and being able to accept the challenges of learning something I was hesitant about opened a world I only half knew existed.

Technology and Humanity: Finding Balance

Technology is the great unknown.

Zooming out far enough we are unsure how it will impact the world; all we know is that it will.

There is a lot of hesitation to embrace it because of the fear around what it could do. I was worried about what it meant about me and why I couldn't understand it or even why I wanted to.

Working in education, an industry that embraces change slowly, technology is directly impacting the way I do my work, the way I interact with my team, and the way I interact with students.

Part of my fear was that technology would replace or remove many of the aspects of my humanity I value:

• Tactile objects
• Creativity
• Human connection
• Relationships
• Problem-solving

What I discovered is that when I keep these in mind, technology allows me to remove barriers that prevent me from more fully embracing these human aspects.

Technology in Action: The Road Trip Example

Recently, I went on a road trip with my in-laws down the Washington coast. There was a list of spots we wanted to visit. Not that long ago, road trips would unfold in real time, with decisions about where to go and how to get there being made spur of the moment.

I appreciate the spontaneity of these moments. It’s one of the aspects of road trips I remember fondly.

Alongside those memories are deep levels of frustration from a lack of decision-making with too many people. Especially with family, these can be potentially relationship-damaging.

Thanks to technology and my willingness to embrace its tools, as a group we were able to:

• Make a list of the places we wanted to go
• Find restaurants along the way with good reviews and food everyone would enjoy
• Map them so we knew how to manage our time
• Create a document with links to the websites for ticket purchases ahead of time
• Include links to map directions in that document
• Every time we got in the car to head to the next place, I just needed to click the link and we were on our way

Like a lot of preplanning, our eyes were bigger than our stomachs; we planned more stops than we actually had time for. The document gave us all the information we needed to make new decisions quickly.

This gave us more time together, which was the whole point of the trip.

What My Technology Journey Taught Me

​Looking back, several principles emerge that might help others navigating their own relationship with technology:

1. Start with purpose, not tools. My initial coding class failed because I had no meaningful problem to solve. Success came when I had a clear purpose: creating better workflows with a new CRM.
2. Embrace imperfect iteration. Perfect solutions rarely emerge fully formed. Building something basic that works, then improving it, creates both better results and deeper learning.
3. Look for the human element. Technology works best when it enhances rather than replaces human connection. The road trip planning didn't eliminate spontaneity—it created space for more meaningful interactions.
4. Recognize when resistance is fear in disguise. Often what feels like principled opposition is actually fear of incompetence or change. Naming this honestly helps move past it.

Looking Back to Move Forward

Looking back to that high school coding class, I realize now what I was missing: context and purpose. Technology without meaningful application remains abstract and intimidating. But when connected to human needs, relationships, and real-world problems, it becomes not just accessible but transformative.

My journey from technological avoidance to embrace hasn't removed my humanity—it's enhanced it. I've found that technology, properly understood and applied, doesn't distance us from what makes us human. Instead, it can clear the path for deeper connections, more creative expression, and greater agency in shaping our world.