It’s the opposite of distraction. A stubborn person is someone who is determined not to change. In contrast to those who feel novaturience, people feeling stubborn aren’t attracted to new things. They resist.
The resistance at the heart of stubbornness reveals that this emotion isn’t really just about the person who feels it. A person can only be stubborn in reaction to someone who is pushing them to change. They’re obstinate only because they’re being provoked. A stubborn feeling seems negative to a person who is asking someone else to change, but to the person who is feeling stubborn, it’s a self-affirming emotion.
There are people who will say that stubbornness is a character flaw, but the people who hold this opinion are those who don’t want people to be the way they are. The difference between stubbornness and confident consistency is subjective. Jennifer Stanford of Emergent Performance Solutions proposes that people reframe the stubbornness they witness in their colleagues as an attachment to traditional ways of doing things. There’s a value to holding to traditions, but there’s also a value to disrupting them. It’s all a matter of what your values are.
For that matter, people who persist in trying to get stubborn people to change could be said to be stubborn themselves. Perhaps we’re all stubborn about some things, and what those things are can change over time. Perhaps stubbornness isn’t really a character trait so much as a mood that we’re cornered into now and then by the aggressive world around us.
