I’m not going to talk about Valentine’s day.
I am doing this even though I don’t really feel like it today. You know the feeling. Sometimes your head wants to be in another place. You can’t seem to find the drive that just yesterday you had to accomplish something. You start having doubts again “Is this worth it?” “Am I good enough?” “Am I the real deal?” It’s a real emotional see saw, am I right? All of this happens to all of us, if it doesn’t happen to you you might be a psychopath, but that’s another story. OK, we all feel this, but what is it then? Glad you asked. This feelings, even though they are not equal, can be bundled in the same space. You can see they’re not equal because the “Am I good enough?” feeling is from someone who is yet to make his mark, but the “Am I the real deal?”, technically called “impostor syndrome”, comes from someone who is already crushing it yet she fears she will be seen for what she is, to her doubting self, a fraud. All this comes from one simple force, Resistance.
“Resistance: the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.” Resistance is a force of nature, of human nature. It’s always there, when we are awake, when we sleep, when we feel cheerful, when we feel gloomy, when we are “in the zone” or when we are “in a rut”, Resistance is always there. We might think we’ve beaten it, but we haven’t. The same way the eagle doesn’t defeat 
gravity when it soars through the sky, because it will have to face it again after sleeping and needing to hunt for another meal. And that is a good thing. It’s a good thing because fighting Resistance is what builds us up. We lift weights in a gym because they cause resistance to our movement and we build muscle from that. We memorize, and have some trouble doing it, because we want to be able to access information later on, and use it, but there is resistance in the memorization process, at least for me.
Resistance is. Resistance will always be there. And it’s relentless. And, as Steven Pressfield said “Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.” Resistance seems to want things to stay the same, but in reality, we know things can’t stay the same, ever. Resistance then wants us to stop moving, to prevent us from provoking that change and produce something. Resistance wants to let things rot. We want to help things live. We want to create. We want to help others create. We want to fight Resistance on every opportunity we get. We fight Resistance every time we decide to write another word, brush another line, talk with one more person, send one more business email, review one more expense report. We fight Resistance all the time we move forward on our creative space. And that’s all there is to it, with Resistance. We only need to know that it’ll never, ever, go away. It will always be there to hold us back. And that is good to know. It’s good to know because we can count on it as we can count on gravity. We can use it to make us go forward. We can use it to make us stronger. We can use it to produce better work everyday. We can use it to force us to stop procrastinating. What? You thought I wouldn’t be able to make a reference to procrastination? It was implied all this time and only in the end did I allow it to show it’s head here.
When you go on this morning, minding your own business, and you feel Resistance, I hope you’re able to recognize it. When you do, first thing before fighting it I want you to recognize it. I want you to see it curiously, and acknowledge it’s existence and power. Then you fight it. You’ll find this way is clearer, you will have more options and you’ll be more successful. Tell us how Resistance has been trying to get you? We’d all love to read it down here in the comments.
