Going through, “The War of Art“, by Steven Pressfield, I am finally putting an ugly face to the name of resistance. Simply put, resistance tries to stop us from doing our work each day. Resistance takes up many forms; the lineup of notifications that call for attention, or fear/denial of potentially beneficial unexplored works etc. Resistance tells us we don’t need to do the things that are actually vital in our life.
There are times when I give resistance a voice in my life. Each time I have gone into a new Praxis module and read up on the task and briefings I step back a bit and think something along the lines of “I don’t think this will help me, who I am doesn’t usually do this, this isn’t for me”. I did this with the current module (#3) I thought to myself ‘I don’t need to get published by another blog, nobody will read my posts, and if I did get published it wouldn’t help me much’. As I write more, I see the value in it, especially when I read about how much of a super skill writing well is (see The Last Safe Investment by Brian Franklin and Michael Ellisburg). In reality, this doubt and distancing is the force of resistance trying to pull me down and stop me from progressing in my work.
I am dead set on using Praxis to break into a totally new career field and radically shake up my life, so why would it cross my mind to do anything but press into this content which has been proven to produce those results. I do not have to string myself out so thin doing every challenge, but when I identify resistance in something that is usually an excellent signal that I SHOULD do the exact thing it tells me not to. In many ways this makes most decisions very easy; if I feel nothing towards a project, it probably won’t help me much, but if I get a knot in my throat or pit in my stomach while reading a project outline that tells me I should do that project to the best of my ability.