Resistance Is Futile



Mostly I have no idea of what I’m going to write until I sit down at the keyboard and see what pops up, but occasionally a thread of a story will make itself known to me in vague ways in the run-up to a new I Am Fab becoming due. I’d love to be going into that a bit more right now, but unfortunately I’ve been running into my old nemesis – resistance. It’s any writer’s worst nightmare (and regular companion).

Resistance is a funny thing. It doesn’t matter how much you enjoy something, you can still develop resistance to it. Writers suffer from it a lot, because we know we have to dig deep for creative inspiration and sometimes our minds just don’t want to play ball. That’s when we surf the net, phone friends, do silly tests online or basically utilise any avoidance tactic known to man, rather than just sit down and do it.

Just to be clear, though, today’s resistance comes to you courtesy of that other form of resistance – trying to do something you don’t really enjoy. Before sitting down to a comfy laptop to meander through some juicy topics with you all, I had to knuckle down to a writing job that, for me, feels worse than root canal. On the surface, it’s a nice enough job writing a corporate website, but something in my soul just doesn’t want to pay attention to anything so divergent from where my own interests lie.

So you have an insight into the lengths I will go to in order to avoid doing work I don’t like, here’s a flavour (by no means exhaustive) of what I managed to fit in before I finally forced myself to concentrate and just do it:

Meditate, phone a friend, clear out my email inbox, make a cup of tea for the cleaner, meet a friend for coffee, do a stretch class, have lunch, clear text inbox on mobile phone, chat to another friend, put out garbage, nominate people as ‘most likely to …’ on Facebook, make a casserole, do laundry, check email again, look up old music producer friend on Google, give wardrobe advice to friend abroad, eat casserole that’s been cooking for 4 hours and do even more stupid time-wasting stuff on Facebook. Oh, and then I actually did some work.

Normally, such a high level of resistance can only really take hold if you're working for yourself. The downside of managing your own time means you can really make a pig's ear of it and you're the only one that suffers for it. The client still gets the work done even if you have to do it late at night because you've goofed about all day. If you're in an office, there's no such luxury of torturing yourself with industrial strength resistance, although plenty of displacement activities do look like work – it's just that they're probably not the actual work you were supposed to be doing. Then there's the not-so-small matter of being distracted by others.

Now, it may look like some of the time other people were distracting me, but in reality I was absolutely enabling the distraction. As Steven Pressfield, who’s written the defining book on creativity called The War Of Art, puts it, resistance is internal. He writes “Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. ‘Peripheral opponents’, as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.”

It may be the inner saboteur, but sometimes resistance shows us what’s right for us and what’s not. Today’s little battle with it has clearly pointed out that I need to focus more on work that I enjoy, because it’s too darned hard to do the stuff that I don’t like! As a friend noted in one of today’s many chats, “wouldn’t it be so much easier just to be motivated by money?”. Amen to that. If that were the motivator for me I’d be pumping the stuff out in record time, but unfortunately I need to feel inspired by the content of what I’m doing, not just the paycheck. Bummer!

Well, the upside is that resistance has helped me clarify what I need to avoid in future. However, it doesn’t always work that way. We often resist what we most need to do, so the art lies in being able to interpret your feelings around what it is that you’re resisting. If it’s just fear or not wanting to apply yourself, that’s probably common or garden resistance, the ten-a-penny kind we get when we just can’t be asked to do something. If it’s Olympic standard resistance like today’s effort, then you need to be asking yourself if you’re avoiding it because you genuinely don’t like it or you’re just daunted by the size of the task.

Steven Pressfield’s rule of thumb is that “the more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” He goes on to say, “Like a magnetised needle floating on a surface of oil, resistance will unfailingly point to true north – meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass, We can navigate by resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.”

This week, take a look at what you’re resisting in life and put it to the test. Are you resisting a soul’s desire or simply having trouble dealing with something that’s not really for you? Are you afraid to take the leap to bring something into manifestation? Are you avoiding facing up to a relationship issue? Is there something that needs to be said at work? Pay attention to what you’re resisting – it’s trying to tell you something.

Maybe next week I’ll get around to telling you the fabulous story that was floating around in my brain in between all those avoidance strategies …

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 29 Oct 07)