The day Resistance took a beating…
It’s 15:15 on the 14th January 2020. Resistance, the beast that had clouded my vision and halted my progress lay on the floor, battered and broken.
It’s been a while since I wrote to you. That’s my bad. To be honest, the past few months have been quite busy and I haven’t had the time to send an email or write a blog post.
But is that the truth?
I’m sure you’ve heard the popular saying (or some form of it):
“If it matters to you, you’ll make the time.”
I don’t know who first wrote this, and it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the truth behind it.
When I say I didn’t have time to write a quick email to you, it’s not exactly true. I could have spent 30 minutes one day a week to write an email, but I didn’t…
So, if I had the time, why didn’t I do it?
The reason is a bit more complex.
Maybe I lacked inspiration… Maybe I lacked motivation… Maybe I didn’t have a plan of what to write…
Whatever it was that stopped me from writing a simple email, was powerful enough that it stopped me for a while.
It’s the same with studying English, writing your paper or planning that trip you’ve been talking about for ages.
There’s something – a fear – that stops you from doing it.
Something called Resistance.
I recently read a book (whilst sitting on a plane from Taiwan to the UK) by Steven Pressfield called ‘Do The Work’. In the book, Steven identifies resistance as the number one cause of death in creative work.
Resistance is a monster that takes the form of several different forces, such as self-doubt, fear of rejection, procrastination, fear of mistakes… and more.
And guess what – the more that you stop working because of resistance, the stronger it grows. It gets to the point that it completely cripples any sort of progress that you make.
And the scary thing is that it never truly goes away.
Anyway, I respect your time, so I’ll stop there.
If this is something that you’re interested in hearing more about (especially how to overcome resistance), then drop me an comment and let me know.
I’ll be happy to write about the steps you can take to overcome resistance if you’re facing some challenges.
Until next time,
Ex nihilo nihil
Sam Pealing
Ps. If you’re interested, you can get the book ‘Do The Work’ by Steven Pressfield here:
That’s an affiliate link^ By using that link, you’ll pay the same, but you’ll be helping me out with some reward from Amazon.