Mind Your Own Resistance

As part of my current module in Praxis I’ve been reading The War of Art  I just finished the first section of the book: Resistance – Defining the Enemy. It had some interesting ideas that I hadn’t really considered in such a way before.

First things first, the author notes that resistance comes from within. At first, I challenged this but I realized that although other people influence our resistance, we often decide for ourselves to be limited in our pursuits.

There are so many things that we make decisions on the help us resist doing what we want to be doing. In almost everything good we try to accomplish we have to fight resistance because good things often bring a challenge.

When fighting resistance we can’t play the victim card, everyone faces resistance. We must face it and control it as much as we can for the better. Playing the victim card would also allow us to be complacent with the resistance, and therefore let it control us. We have to do better.

Even our own identity can be limited in resistance, and that’s dangerous as it can limit our desire and motivation to pursue what’s is important in life. Resistance often makes us unhappy and sometimes encourages us to turn to bad alternatives, its here where resistance becomes truly scary threat to our well-being.

The one thing I don’t agree with is that resistance is always bad, resistance can keep us from doing things that would be bad for us, choices that would taint our reputation for the worse, or actions that would lead us to harm.

I had never analyzed resistance in the way this book presented it before, but it left me challenged, albeit slightly conflicted as well. I look forward to reading the next section: Combating Resistance – Turning Pro.