Befriending Resistance
Have you ever really wanted to do something and yet you can’t seem to ever do it? Well, that’s been happening to me a lot lately.
Candidly, I’ve sat down to write this post at least four times. Each time I produce a half-baked draft that languishes in my computer. I can’t quite seem to get it to the finish line.
And perhaps the greatest irony of all is that I’ve been trying to write about how to befriend the resistance that naturally appears when you’re creating something new. (Resisting writing about Resistance. It’s all very meta.)
So, in the spirit of befriending the Resistance I want to write about, I’m going to just do the thing and muddle through it.
I first encountered the idea of Resistance in Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art. He writes:
Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work in potential. It’s a repelling force […] It’s aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
In sum, Resistance is something that we feel that keeps us from doing the thing we seemingly want to do. It’s the lack of energy that prevents you from lacing up those new running you shoes you bought. It’s the perfectionist worries that stop you from cracking the spine on that new notebook you intended to write your novel in. It’s the thoughts that have been cluttering my head, making it near impossible for me to draft this post.
it shows up differently for everyone but here are some common ways that it shows up in my head:
No one’s asking for this (so do the things people are asking for)
I have too much time (so I’ll start later)
I don’t have enough time (so why bother starting at all)
I don’t know enough (so let’s learn more)
I know too much (so how could I ever summarize it succinctly)
Those clothes really DO need to be folded.
The bad news: the Resistance isn’t likely ever going to go away.
The good news: Because it’s not going anywhere, we can stop beating ourselves up about it whenever its rears its ugly head. And maybe we can even start to look at it differently.
What if we started to think about our Resistance as a cheerleader dressed in critic’s clothing?
What if Resistance wasn’t trying to tell us to stop? But was instead trying to tell us to keep going?
What happens if we started to see Resistance as a natural response to doing something new? Something that we really cared about?
What would change if we thanked the Resistance for trying to protect us from doing something that’s likely hard, scary, and unknown?
What would become possible if you befriended your Resistance and worked with it?
Because at the end of the day the Resistance is real. There’s no doubt about that. But maybe it doesn’t mean what we think it means.
PS. Hey, look at that, I finally wrote this blog post.
