How do you experience resistance? To your writing, to your dreams, to your spiritual life? Talk to me.
In
Do the Work, Pressfield names 6 champions on our side for overcoming resistance. Choose one and tell me how it works for you, and tie in Pressfield's ideas about it.
10 comments:
Passion. To write because you are in love with the words and the feelings. Not just your own personally, or those belonging to anyone in particular, just the love of the idea of writing a song. This is what keeps me writing. I don't have to love my work. I don't love my work. Often times I don't even like it. But I write anyways because there is nothing else I know how to do, meaning that there is little else I know how to even think about. Fear often cripples me. I think "I don't like this/Look how much better they are then me/Why am I not good at this." But it doesn't matter how afraid I am of my own critique or the opinions of others because I am in love with writing.
I use to feel the same way, Nathan. I guess the passion was greater than the fear.
Sammie Moore: Pressfield says " Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work." This is exactly how I feel! I struggle with a few of the types of resistance. I self-doubt my songs and I get easily distracted while writing songs because I get discouraged and feel like I am getting no where. I also struggle with fear. I am fearful that my songs are not good, and if I show them to someone, they will hate it. I think that this is one of the biggest problems with my songwriting. I end up not finishing songs because I get so discouraged that I quit. This is something that I need to work on with perseverance, because the resistance will always be there. The only thing I can change is me and how I go about pushing through it.
In every aspect of my life I struggle with feeling like anything I do matters. And if what I do doesn't matter, what am I worth in this world? I know the first flaw comes from that very logic: that I have to "do" something in order to matter. It's no surprise that I struggle with feeling that my art has worth when most times I don't even feel that I myself have worth.
In some ways I feel like we're almost raised to feel this way. Our culture focuses in on the celebrities: what they do, what they look like, how great (or how terrible) they are. We are made to feel inferior by these images of people with money and fame and success that we will never achieve.
That is why I like Pressfield's statement about Stupidity as our first ally. He says "The three dumbest guys I know: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill." No "smart" person would have done things as outrageous as these men did. They dreamed the impossible and made it reality. Setting out to accomplish the impossible is just plain stupid. But isn't that what we are setting out to do with our songs? Little, insignificant us. Just kids going to a little nowhere school in Nashville trying to create things of musical and lyrical merit and put them into the world. Why would we do that? Listen to sense. Spend your time perfecting skills that have "real world" application (at least, that's what the Treveccan would tell us.)
So we're stupid. And we should glory in our stupidity. Because at the end of the day, we are writers and we would be doing God, ourselves, and the world a disservice if we didn't write shamelessly and stupidly.
And I love that Pressfield doesn't say "brave" or "headstrong" or even "idealistic". He says stupid. Because anyone can be stupid. And in fact, we should be :)
I chose the champion to be Friends and Family. Pressfield states that when you have fame and money what is left? "Only two things will remain with us across the river: our inhering genius and the hearts we love." Pressfield presents the question, who are we doing what we love for? Perhaps doing it for ourselves is selfish, but at the end of the book, he gives a lovely paragraph written by Marianne Williamson that says art isn't selfish but when we do it for the glory of the Lord it frees us from ourselves and gives Him the power to shine through us. Our friends and family truly mold us into who we are. We become like who we hang out with. The book also mentions crashes. In life crashes are there to make us grow, or to make us stronger. When I look back and notice some of the crashes in my life, I am so thankful for my family in friends in the time of success and the time where I felt like everything had "crashed." Sometimes in life, family is all we have left when we have everything and when we have nothing. It is the most important thing to hold on to.
Fear and self-doubt has been something that creeps in from time to time and has been a resistance for me. I sometimes feel like my songs might not be good enough, but then I am reminded why I’m doing what I’m doing. We cannot constantly be consumed in what other people think about us, or it will only paralyze you.
I am incredibly thankful to have a supportive family and friends in my life that keep me grounded and speak truth. I would choose Passion as my champion. When I start to play music and it brings this amazing feeling, I don’t ever want to stop. Especially when I play songs for other people and I see how it moves them, whether that’s bringing a smile to their face or if it’s tears. Pressfield states that fear saps passion. “When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”
Most of the prevention that I experience is resistance in the form of potential failure. Most people don't enjoy failure. "Every song I write has to be better than the last.." This is what I tell myself. This is my resistance. If I set my standard for achievement at a high level then I must achieve it every time. If I can't do that then I must stay below that level so that I stop feeling like a failure. This logic was the road block I used to enable myself to resist for many years. Although I knew what I needed to do it took time to understand and put into discipline the positive thoughts of "keeping at it" or "starting and finishing consistently to reach potential". It is so important to understand our foundation of thought and belief so that we may root out the ideas that only cause grief and strife.
Resistance comes at me through self-vulnerability. When opportunities arise, sometimes I found myself afraid to step out because of the possibility of failure or judgement that I may not find comforting. Another way I have experienced resistance is through lack of a personal prayer life. When I'm not in my Word or talking to God, I'm unable to function properly. I am weak and cannot get through daily tasks without His support.
Passion is a huge factor in overcoming resistance. When my passion for songwriting, there is a drive in me that desires to write songs and to speak a message. Through this drive, I am able to overcome resistance most of the time. If I ever have any fears, as soon as I conquer them, I am able to find an abundance of passion!
I think that one champion that relates to me is Stubbornness. I’m here, and there is next to nothing that a person can do to deter me from quitting music. Music is my dream and quitting is my nightmare. One thing that keeps me going is my faith that I know that there is something waiting for me in the future. I am sometimes amazed by how stubborn even I am. I can be a pain to even myself. I won’t easily quit on myself because I know that music is where I’m supposed to be and quitting would mean failing myself, which is the hardest thing for me to do. It is one thing to fail other people because they might not understand me and what I can do. But when I fail myself, only I am responsible. Only I know what I’m capable of. If something doesn’t work, I’ll try to make a way it will. If it’s not in my power, I’ll keep working so that one day it is.
Sean Kilpatrick
“READING ASSIGNMENT”!
I experience resistance particularly when I don't have anything else to say. Most of the time, the
music I write will always tell me what the song is going to be about, and that is my method.
That's the only way I write, if I ever have lyrics before I have music, I have a poem. To put
predetermined words to music is not a natural thing for me. To write a song, I write music, and it
gives me a certain feeling, and it gives me certain emotions, and I use the power of the music to
produce whatever lyrics flow out of it. This however poses a particular problem; the words now
come from passion and feeling rather than whatever is at the top of your head, so I find myself
waiting, sometimes weeks or months, for the right words to surface. Passion is my champion. If
I use anything else to inspire my lyrics, I feel like I've cheated myself and I need to start over,
and I have, several times. For me, if passion is not in my writing, it's an assignment, more
homework, and I'm not interested. Pressfield talks about losing your passion or not being able to
identify it, and this is an ongoing problem for me regarding songwriting, but once I can
overcome the fear of saying something I didn't mean to say or not saying something i meant to,
passion is all that is left.!
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