In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks about the gap between the life we want to live on the inside and the life we are living on the outside, he calls this gap the resistance.
He says it’s a universal toxin that all of us face.
I can tell you it kicked my hiney in a big way for a lot of my years simply because I didn’t know what it was, and it still does if I’m not paying attention.
It’s the force that pushes against you and keeps you small.
In the book he states it so well when he says, “it’s the painter who won’t paint, the writer who won’t write, and the entrepreneur who hasn’t started a business”.
For me it shows up in so many ways… the biggest way was by not putting myself out there and showing up for my life. I can literally feel the brick wall in front of me and in my chest when I’m facing the resistance.
So I started little by little, making choices that would force me to try something even if I fail, to speak up even if I might say something wrong, and to share who I am even though I might be judged for it.
Sometimes I’m shaking in my boots as I do it, and some of my preface has been painful to say the least, but my goal was to just do it. Zig Zigler said,” anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can do it well” and I use his words to get me through.
And you know what? People can be so nice!
Most people sit back and watch without saying a word, but there are some people consistently cheering me on as I step out into this scary world who I never would have dreamed would become my support…some of them I hadn’t even met yet because I was staying small.
This has been the most fulfilling and rewarding personal journey I have been on in years, or maybe ever, and I really can’t wait to see how the path reveals itself to me as I go.
Who is coming with me?
P.S. The picture I chose for this post is so much a depiction of what it was like for my mom to push me through my resistance throughout my life. I am beyond thankful she kept me going until I could figure it out myself❤️