Resistance — The one enemy you should face

You want to make a new change in your life. You’re ready and have removed all excuses. But somehow, life keeps throwing some urgent things at you. Commitments fly, new work arrives and you just can’t get started.

You promise every weekend you will start on Monday. It never happens.

Frustration starts to grow and the more you try, the more you fail. You simply can’t start.

You’re a warrior, but your enemy still eludes you. It hides in every urgent assignment, behind every activity you use to avoid starting. It’s clearly there, and you know it, but you can’t pin it down.

Allow me to unmask it for you.

The one enemy

I remember when I was trying to set up this site. I fought a long and hard battle to get it up and running. It was hidden in my perfectionism, and it was there too when I was afraid to publish my first article.

The one enemy every warrior has to face is: Resistance.

It’s there when you try to start working and a million things just keep you from doing.

It’s there when you hide your work for fear of being criticized.

It’s there when you try to get it just perfect.

It’s simply resistance.

One thing is true, we all have to face it. Each and every day a true warrior has to get up and fight it again. It just never goes away, but you can take action and gather some momentum to really fight against it.

A lot of warriors try hard to overcome it, but when they feel secure, resistance comes again and throws them off the horse, they are defeated. That’s why many go to the gym with all the energy just miss the second day and then the third until they just quit.

We think we have won the battle when the war is just starting out.

I don’t want you to lose the war against resistance. You’ve a powerful warrior spirit and you deserve a good and happy life.

It’s time to stand against resistance, it’s time to really fight against it. It’s time to become a true warrior.

Getting to know your enemy

Resistance is truly cunning, it can hide in plain sight. We can even mistake it for a lot of other things. At the very heart of resistance you will find that it’s your best teacher. Yes, it sounds weird, but you know you’re growing when resistance is present.

To win each and every battle against resistance, you need to understand how it works. The formula is simple, yet it has caught me off guard an insane amount of times.

When you’re about to take a step outside of your comfort zone, resistance hits you and hits you HARD. But it never attacks from the front. It will find different allies. You need to understand each one.

• Fear: When you’re afraid, it’s resistance then one giving you all the scary thoughts. Fear of failure and success are the most common here, being afraid to start because of what could happen is in itself ridiculous, you can’t predict the future, but still fear consumes a lot of warriors.
• Perfectionism: This ally hits HARD, it’s in fact one of the most dangerous. From experience I can tell you, perfection is impossible to reach, you can nudge every detail and try to get everything into place, but that will never happen. Some warriors like myself fail here, lured by the voice of perfectionism.
• Urgent matters: By now you should know that urgent doesn’t mean important, but when the world presses us for results, we think we should jump right into it. This is one of the most powerful traps, so much that a lot of warriors accept it gladly. Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and your phone are the most common pitfalls.
• Procrastination: Our old enemy, usually in the form of a couch or the TV, it’s hard to resist the desire of taking just another 5 minutes away from what really matters. And suddenly we have spent hours in front of the TV just wasting our time, our most precious resource.

These are a few of our enemies, but the overlord is always behind it. Resistance will try to get you.

You have a list with their names, now it’s the time to face them. It’s the time to understand yourself and you won’t fail in your quest.

Knowing yourself

All the warriors that have passed before us, those who have achieved great things, have one thing in common: They understood themselves. They know who they are and use this information to fight resistance and overcome it, again and again.

To win this battle, my fellow warrior, you need to understand yourself.

Resistance comes from within us. If you understand yourself, you can spot even the smallest of the symptoms. You’ll see any of it’s allies coming in the distance.

It takes practice, but the investment is well worth it. You will be able to start and finish anything you wish. You will stop trying and start doing.

You’re born to do more than just watch TV and be afraid of what the world may think of you.

You’re here to let your warrior spirit guide you, and make your battle cry sound far and wide. That’s why I’ll share with you my battle plan against resistance.

Winning against resistance

In the legendary book The Art of War, Sun Tzu tells us:

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Back when I started fighting against resistance I lost each and every battle, because I only knew it existed. I lacked the most important step: I didn’t know myself. That’s why I created this battle plan. To know myself at each and every step, now I share it with you:

• Know your values: Your values are your guide, they know where you should go and the best decisions you should take. Spending some time finding your core values and checking with them from time to time will prove to be one of the best investments you can make. Your core values are your most powerful allies in this battle.
• Understanding your reasons: You need to know why you’ll fight this battle, this higher purpose should keep you accountable and it’s the hand that will help you get up if you fall. This one is the core idea inside your battle-cry.
• Learn how to motivate yourself: This battle, just as life itself, has actions that you don’t really want to take. Knowing how to nudge you in the way of action is one key component to this strategy. You need to devote some time to create the right conditions that will move you into the battle field without effort.
• Uncover your beliefs: It’s true, your beliefs can make you or break you. I’m not talking about religion, but what you believe about everything in the world. Some of this aren’t yours, and you must spot them. That way you won’t lose your way towards victory.
• Listen to your calling: This is the hardest one, it involves facing your fears and growing your comfort zone. Your calling is what you came here to do. It’s hard to listen to it, because it involves a lot of changes in your life, but if you take the time to understand it and use the steps before, you’ll be able to take the right actions and complete the mission you’re here to do without any regrets.
• Creating momentum: I don’t like to take huge actions to move forward, I prefer taking small actions and claim small victories in order to build momentum. Each small victory makes you feel like you’re the king of the world, learning to use that feeling to fight resistance is key to win this battle.
• Learning from your mistakes: You may fall from the horse from time to time. It’s ok, you’re not perfect and you should understand that making a mistake isn’t the end of the world, however, not learning from that mistake can be the difference between victory and defeat.
• Understand when to fight: You can’t charge against everything and hope for the best. You’re a warrior and you understand when it’s better to call it a day and when you should press forward.

This battle plan has given me great results. Discovering it is part of the victory, but learning to take the actions is a different story.

Training you to be a true modern warrior

I could write entire posts about each step (I have done it for a few of them). But that wouldn’t deliver enough value. That’s why I sat with Kym and took the time to develop a whole course around it.

My real interest is for you to have all the weapons you need, that’s why the course is completely FREE. We decided to break it down into a lesson each day for 30 days. That way it won’t be overwhelming.

How can you get in? Simple, just fill in your first name and your mail in the fields below and click the “subscribe” button.

This is an evolution from our humble Enso Journey Warrior Dojo. You’ll still get our Enso Journey Warrior Manual along with all the course and updates from our site.

We try our best to move forward and deliver the best value we can. It’s thanks to you that this place has grown in the past months. We want to make it grow even more.

It’s time for you to take control of your life and overcome resistance each and every day. We welcome you.

Do you have your own method to overcome resistance? Do you want to learn more about our course? Let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to help you.