Just do it … and ideally, find someone to help you do so

As a few of you know, I haven’t blogged in about a week, despite my initial plan to blog on a regular basis.

The primary thing that stopped me from writing during these last several days was classic resistance patterns of mine – including a whole host of thoughts that seemed quite rational (at the time) as valid reasons for why I shouldn’t make any blog entries during these past several days, including the thought "no one's reading this anyway."

I’m not honestly sure about what finally pushed me over the edge to start writing again today after my week-long hiatus. One of the primary contributing factors motivating me to start writing again, though, was that one of you (you know who you are) wrote me an email a couple days ago saying that you were following my blog, and that you wanted me to make a new entry. That note provided real inspiration to me.

Today, now that I have (finally) returned to my computer, ready to create a new blog entry, I feel really happy to be back … and remember why I wanted to blog in the first place … and realize that my resistance during these past several days was counter-productive, stopping me from doing what I really wanted to do.

In my initial blog entries, I wasn’t sure that people would be able to relate to the stories I was telling. That is not true today. I know that each of you experiences resistance like what I just went through last week all the time … and that, like me, your resistance regularly stops you from doing what you truly want to do … and that (unless you are far more enlightened than I am) you probably hate your resistance as much as I hate mine.

I wish that I could write something really insightful here about how you and I can consistently overcome our resistance and live the life of our dreams.

Perhaps the following story, quoted from The War of Art, my favorite book on the subject of resistance, will help all of us a bit:

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

As this story suggests, at some level, there’s not much to say about how to overcome resistance beyond Nike’s adage that we should “just do it.”

The flip side of this coin, though, is that it is MUCH easier for any of us to overcome resistance when we have support structures in place that help us do what we want. So, for example: I had someone out there in the blogosphere who cares about me who wanted me to write – and that person’s support helped me to return to this computer; alcoholics will tell you that their AA groups save their lives; serious meditators join a “sangha” to deepen their practice; and people who hire personal trainers work out more than those who don’t.

So guys, my message for today – which (as with all my blog entries) is being told to myself as much as you – is that, when it comes to that set of things that we need to do to take care of ourselves but that we resist, we need to “just do it” … but, just in case that strategy proves limiting, we’d also be well advised to build ourselves dependable support structures made up of other people around ourselves who will help us remember why we committed to our goals in the first place.