What to do about the Resistance?
I have the utmost respect for the French Resistance in WWII. To resist the Nazis and for their future freedom, they risked much in harrowing circumstances that we can barely relate to. Many lost their lives.
What courage! But, this is not the resistance I’m writing about.
This about inner resistance that prevents us from doing what we ought to do.
Supported by procrastination, akrasia, and a host of other limitations and human weaknesses, our best work remains inside us because we succumb to resistance. Instead of dealing effectively with it.
Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul. — Ezra Taft Benson
I discussed resistance here and defined it as:
..that invisible force that summarizes the fear, self-doubt, procrastination (and I would add akrasia), addiction, distraction, timidity, ego and narcissism, self-loathing (though I would say some of this can be healthy at times), perfectionism, etc. that keep you from doing the good work(s) you’ve been called to do.
And this is especially relevant when you are doing something creative, innovative, new, rarely done, or counter-cultural.
So what can we do about it?
Hide until it passes? Hope that it will just go away?
Push through it at all cost— even destroying ourselves or our families in the process?
Well, no…
Hiding till it passes won’t work because its always there when you attempt great things.
So yes, maybe hide until the urge fades in your psyche to do anything of significance / innovative / outside the box and continue on in aimless mediocrity. But don’t expect Resistance to go away. The moment you commit again to press on in your noble pursuit for change and growth, you will bump into it again.
Pushing through at all costs won’t work either. If millennia of thought, not to mention divine revelation and human experience have taught us anything, its that we are mere mortals and alone can accomplish little. Especially when pursuing something game changing and new or simply counter-cultural or that goes against the tide of disengagement and negativity.
So, what might we do about Resistance? Notice my change of term: I said “might” and not “can”.
Some years ago I learned of this phrase that innovators use to avoid limiting their options and prejudging situations:
“How might we”.
According to Harvard Business Review the originator of this was a business consultant called Min Basadur who developed this early in his career while a creative manager at Procter & Gamble.
Min Basadur … has taught the How Might We (HMW) form of questioning to companies over the past four decades.
“People may start out asking, ‘How can we do this,’ or ‘How should we do that?,’” Basadur explained to me. “But as soon as you start using words like can and should, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should we?” By substituting the word might, he says, “you’re able to defer judgment, which helps people to create options more freely, and opens up more possibilities.”
What possibilities then open up for us when we consider how we might tackle Resistance?
Here is what I was reminded of recently — in fact, I’m practicing it as I write this, having committed recently to a new regimen that involved more frequent writing and predictably hitting Resistance right out of the gate.
Jesus Christ said that “perfect love casts out fear”. If Resistance is a Dragon that we all face on the field of Self then we’ll need to face our fears. And if love is ultimately what deals the decisive blow to get rid of it, what is the process or mechanism that accomplishes that?
Here was my journey through resistance recently and I hope you with the “How might we?” mindset in play might also be able to leverage this in your battle.
I first learned of Resistance in Do the Work by Steven Pressfield the self-proclaimed “amateur classicist in the Latin-root sense of “ama-” (love), someone who does it just because he loves it”. Pressfield is a former US Marine and author of The Legend of Bagger Vance. Later he wrote the historical novels Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Virtues of War, The Afghan Campaign and Killing Rommel.
True to the title of another of his books, he knows a thing or two about “The War of Art” and his book by this title, a companion to “Do the Work”, deals extensively with creativity, and getting hard things done. In fact, in a recent podcast interview of Seth Godin by Tim Ferriss, Pressfield came up several times. Godin particularly referenced the audio version of The War of Art read by Pressfield himself (Godin finds Pressfield’s voice fascinating). He views it as a valuable resource to consume and share — particularly when feeling stuck. I agree!
So, when I dealt with a particularly debilitating patch of Resistance recently, I reviewed a section of Do the Work that deals specifically with Resistance and proceeded to do battle with it along these lines…
- Remember always that the very encounter with Resistance means you are doing something right!
- Keep working! Act. — Keep on swimming (no real secret here: Einstein supposedly said:
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
- Reflect. Fill in the gaps — this is in reference to his method he calls the “foolscap” method where you distill your project down to a single page similar to how a film concept or book concept might be and then continually go back to it refine it and ensure that the details you are working on (filling in the gaps in the overall outline) stay on theme. I’ve adopted this One Pager method and describe it here.
- Remember that love is the opposite of fear — do what you’re doing for the love of it and the love of those you are doing it for.
- Find assistance — seek help remembering that you are not in this alone and you can’t do it alone! Perhaps you’ve fallen under the spell of individualism — which useful at time will also stifle your creativity. SIDENOTE: Consider the book “Hooked: How to build habit-forming product” which has become the ultimate example for me of collaboration on a project. Most authors will reference a handful of people they are indebted to for getting their work out, but Nir Eyal the author of Hooked mentions around 8 pages of names double column, single spaced in his acknowledgements section. If like me you were fascinated by this read more here.
- Remember the over-comers. Draw inspiration from others who have gone before you. Remember that they also found themselves in the position you are in now and overcame the Dragon Resistance!
You may also need to revisit your motivations and your commitment to the project. Pressfield lists two questions and identified the best and essential answers to those questions to ensure you’re up to the task:
- How badly do you want it? If you are not “totally committed” then perhaps its time to stop?
- Why do you want it? If its not at least to serve your vision of how life / mankind ought to be (and even with this you might need to consider what you need to “check at the door”) or because of fun and beauty and ultimately because you have no other choice, then stop!
Here are the things Pressfield insists you must check at the door:
- Ego — Check out the book “Ego is the Enemy” if you’re not convinced. Personally I saw much greater impact from my work over the years when I stopped “making it about me”. What you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit is much greater than you can accomplish while hoarding glory.
- Sense of Entitlement — we come into the world with nothing and we will leave with nothing. What makes us think we are entitled to things in between?
- Impatience — its going to to take time. Success does not happen overnight. The overnight “successes” we see are typically years or even decades in the making.
- Fear — replace with courage which acknowledges the issue, but does not cower in the face of it.
- Hope — it’s not an engineering solution. I don’t agree that we disregard or remove hope, but we can’t expect it to be useful in the heat of the battle — I believe that hope is what fuels us for the next wave of action. Regularly go back to your home base, your reflection, your daily routine, you’re source of inspiration, and build up your reserves of hope, to push yourself back out into the fray again.
- Anger — “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Mark Twain.
Even when you fail, get up and keep working again — realizing that you go back to square one the wiser for it.
Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up. — Alfred (Butler) to Bruce Wayne (Batman w/out the suit)
I can’t promise that you will win every battle against Resistance, I know I don’t. And you’ll have to keep checking back with me on how my battle is going. However, I can attest to this: battling works much better than laying down and giving up.
Resist the Resistance.
Press on!
If you liked this please or learned from it please let me know and share it with others.
References:
- Do the Work, by Steven Pressfield
- The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield
- Hooked, by Nir Eyal
- Links to Tim Ferriss interviewing Seth Godin where Seth talks about Pressfield / War of Art: either this one or this one. Both are worth your time.
