If there’s one thing we’re all going to come away from COVID-19 with, it’s greater self-awareness. Awareness of our shortcomings and our faults, as well as our strengths and talents. As I chat with women lately about this topic, one thing that keeps coming up is resistance. Women ask me, “Amanda, I can’t seem to make any progress on this one thing.” And it almost always comes down to overcoming resistance.
I think we all deal with resistance in different areas of our lives but I think that many times, we aren’t even aware that’s what we’re dealing with.
The term resistance has a built-in negative connotation in our language.
What do you do every time you walk past the chocolate cake on the counter? You resist it. To most of us, resistance indicates something we’re deciding not to do. It’s something we are actively avoiding.
In today’s episode, I want to turn the tables on the term resistance and give you a new way to think about it.
Can we just take a minute first, and acknowledge that in these weird times, many of us may be feeling quite stuck. Many of us feel stalled out in reaching our goals and we aren’t sure how to get unstuck.
My desire is to support you in all these things, so I want to let you know about 2 specific ways I am doing that right now.
First, I have a free workshop coming up that will answer some of the deeper-level, root cause reasons you might feel stuck. In this workshop, we’ll talk about why your weight loss might be stalled out and I’ll give you 3 strategies to kick it into gear again.
Secondly, if you’ve been feeling stuck for a while, maybe even years, and you’re ready to have somebody step in and help you, I would love to be the one to step in and support you. I can do that in 2 ways: through one-on-one coaching or group coaching.
My goal with my coaching clients is always to get to the root cause, to dig in, and educate ourselves on what’s keeping you from where you want to be. Once we get to the bottom of the reasons, we will create a plan to catapult you into forward progress.
If you are ready to connect with me and chat about how I can help you reach your goals, reach out to me at Feel Amazing Naked and let’s set up a call. 
What You Resist, Persists…and Grows Bigger
There are many things I resist in my own life, things like doing the fricken dishes and keeping up with the laundry.
For a long time, Justin and I resisted seeing our debt. When we finally decided to attack it and become debt-free, I began to resist the bills when they came in. I would stick them in the corner of the counter and try to ignore them.
But you know what happened, right? Those damn bills grew eyeballs and they watched me every time I walked by, daring me to open them, wooing me in. It’s that whole chocolate cake effect, right?
What you resist, persists, and it grows bigger.
The more I ignored those bills, the bigger they grew. The more we ignored our debt, the more our spending patterns were ingrained, and our debt grew bigger and bigger.
What Are You Resisting?
If what you resist, persists and grows bigger, think about the things you are currently resisting.
If you are resisting making changes in your eating habits, your weight gain will persist, and it will grow bigger.
If you resist starting that business you’ve been dreaming of for years, you feel less fulfilled with your work and in your life overall.
The more we resist making the changes we need to make, the more our self-confidence dwindles, and the less we believe in ourselves. And the more our lack of self-confidence grows, the more likely we are to go into a downward spiral.
But overcoming resistance is hard, and if our self-confidence is low, it’s even harder.
Resistance as an Invitation
What if we begin to turn away from seeing resistance as avoiding things, and instead, we see it as an invitation?
I’ve started practicing this in my own life and the results have been shocking. But this hasn’t been without its difficulties.
Doing this kind of mind-shift requires a crap ton of hard work. You have to lean hard into the mantra of, “I can do hard things.”
We Always Choose the Easy Path
If I were coaching you right now, I would ask you to write out a list of things you want to accomplish in your life. And you might list things like lose weight, exercise regularly, meal plan and prep, journal, meditate, eat balanced plates, etc.
If you were to just sit with that list for a while, you would start to feel pulled toward one or two items on the list.
And the items you feel pulled toward are the ones that feel easy to you. The ones that offer an immediate reward, like working out. When you work out, you get the endorphins.
But when you eat a balanced plate, there is no immediate, obvious benefit.
The point is, we will almost always choose to work on the thing that will give us the most immediate, easiest, and most tangible results.
But the thing we resist the most is typically the thing that will bring about the greatest results in our lives.
Overcoming resistance has a huge ROI (return on investment).
What Does Resistance Really Mean?
When it came to our debt, the resistance was there because we simply had no idea where to start. It was completely overwhelming.
I think this is the thing that holds most women back from working on their health. They just feel overwhelmed and they don’t know where to start.
It’s seeing the end but not knowing the first step to take to even get on the right path.
For some of us, fear is involved. What if you set out on this weight loss journey to lose 50 lbs but you can’t do it? If you self-sabotage because you’ve tried in the past and failed, why should this time be any different?
Maybe you have a fear of being rejected by others or of being found out as a fraud. Imposter syndrome is a real fear for many people.
When you continue to resist things in your life, you continue to play small.
What Does Overcoming Resistance Look Like?
We all know what resistance looks like, right? It’s your own personal Groundhog Day.
It’s doing the same things day after day after day, never making forward progress, never reaching the goals you say you want to reach, always staying the same, and never changing.
It is stagnation. And the one thing that scares me more than anything is the thought of becoming stagnant in my life. I know that if you’re reading this and following me, you don’t want to be stagnant either.
But how do you overcome the resistance that scares you into stagnation?
It starts with the self-awareness I mentioned at the beginning. We have to always be getting to know ourselves better, connecting more deeply with others, and growing in intimacy with our spouse.
Overcoming the Fear of Failure
I love this quote by Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?”
So many of us are afraid of failure. We neglect to see the possibility, even the probability that we could make the things we dream of actually happen.
Sometimes, what we’re afraid of is keeping up with the success we create. We fear the success more than we do the failure.
The Power of Overcoming Resistance
So, once we identify what the resistance is, and the root causes of the resistance, we can address what it feels like when we are able to finally overcome that resistance.
Here’s what happens once you have the breakthrough- instead of choosing the easiest thing on your list of goals to tackle, you choose the one you always resist. You overcome resistance by choosing to do the things that seem too hard but have the greatest return on your investment.
The cool thing is that once you make the decision to overcome the resistance you feel toward that thing, you make progress very quickly. You actually do overcome the resistance. You do make progress on your goals.
The more you are able to overcome resistance in your life, the more your self-confidence grows and the more empowered you feel. It gives you the confidence to attack other areas of your life that you’ve been putting off because now you know you can do what it takes.
The beauty of this whole process is coming to the place where you do the things you say you’re going to do for yourself.
Here’s the thing, ladies, resistance is always present when something needs to be done, when you know for a fact you need to do it.
When I had the idea to start this podcast, I was scared sh*tless. I came up with all sorts of reasons I didn’t think I should do it. Until I recognized that the resistance I was feeling meant that the podcast was exactly what I had to do.
So, let me ask you, what’s on your list of goals that you keep writing down but you never choose it to work on? Is it as simple as doing the dishes? Or is it bigger, like starting a business?
Whatever it is, start at the root to figure out what the resistance you feel is all about, and then start dealing with it step-by-step until you build some self-confidence. And then, watch out, because your success is inevitable.
There may be many layers of this onion that you have to peel back before you get to all the root causes. If you don’t know where to start, I am here to help.
SCHEDULE A FREE DEEP DIVE CALL WITH ME HERE.
XO,
Amanda
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