Is It Me, or What?
Uh, yes, sorry to say, it's you.
I get a lot of blank stares when I start talking to people about resistance. Most can relate to the resistance they feel when a task or event pops up that they dislike, aren’t motivated to do or attend, or otherwise find objectionable (it’s too boring!). Most only do the task or attend the event if they force themselves to or are forced by someone else to.
But most don’t understand that the dislike, the lack of motivation, and all their objections are resistance. Negative judgments, opinions, and beliefs are resistance and cause us to struggle.
Here’s what this looks like: The report is due on Friday. You hate doing this report. It involves a lengthy, complicated process that you consider time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating. And of course, no one appreciates how hard you work on it. It looms like a dark cloud over your entire week until, late Wednesday afternoon, you have no choice but to start working on it. So you do. But you struggle. And until it is complete and sent out on Friday the dark cloud hangs over you. You are in a bad mood, feel stressed out, and resentfully revisit every life choice you made that brought you to this job. This happens every month. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Most also don’t understand that it is just as easy (and common) to have resistance around a task or event you do want to complete or attend.
Here’s what this looks like: You want to start your own YouTube channel. You feel you have the personality, the gift of gab, and the POV that would make you a whiz-bang at this. Plenty of people are making money doing this, why shouldn’t you? You spend a considerable amount of time researching, getting the right equipment, and planning your content strategy. This takes up a lot of your time and when your friends ask about this project of yours you gleefully fill them in on everything you are doing. However, nine months into this new venture you have yet to record 10 seconds of video, let alone upload anything finished. The problem? Resistance. Not that it looks like anything in the first example, but resistance nonetheless.
The resistance I speak about (and teach people how to neutralize) is internally generated.
It shows up in plenty of costumes. Procrastination. Perfectionism, the kind that always needs one more thing before it can start. The doom-scroll that eats the hour you meant to use differently. The story where nothing ever works out for you, no matter what you try. The “yes, but” to every idea, before you’ve even heard the whole idea.
Different costumes. Same root.
And the cost to you is not abstract. Your productivity suffers because of resistance.
Resistance drains your energy. You fight reality, reality doesn’t care, and you lose fuel before you’ve spent a drop of it on the actual work.
Resistance clouds your judgment. Emotional arousal shuts down clear thinking. You can’t plan well, decide well, or move well from inside a mental storm.
Resistance prolongs the suffering. Five minutes of inconvenience can become five hours of brooding. Resistance keeps the event alive long after it ended.
Resistance narrows your options. Tunnel vision sets in. You see the threat and nothing past it. The solution that was right there becomes invisible.
Resistance kills effective action. Everything you had goes to the fighting, not the doing. You arrive at the task already spent.
This is why no system fixes it. No planner, no app, no productivity tool reaches the root. Because the root isn’t in the tool. The root is in you, in the form of resistance. (But don’t lose heart: once you have learned to neutralize resistance, every productivity tool works better.)
Resistance causes friction. Friction causes drag. And drag is what causes us to struggle. And to suffer.
Next week, we start looking at how resistance actually shows up, the specific costumes it wears so that you don’t recognize it while it’s running. Because the first move, always, is to see it clearly.
Naming it clearly,
Alessandra
P.S. Directive 1 of Work Without Working is available in full, for free at
https://workwithoutworking.co