Your Intuition Will Never Make You Feel Bad Or Small
One of the most fundamental and crucial mental models I have ever learned is Steven Pressfield’s idea of Resistance.
When asked to reflect, I realised it was the most important lesson I had learned in the first year of running my own business.
It is at the centre of my 12-Minute Method books: both their creation and the content itself.
At its highest level Pressfield’s idea is this: there is a force at play in each of us, set perfectly against the callings of our Higher Selves.
It shows up as the avoidance techniques, the procrastination, the ways we talk to ourselves that keep us small and keep us from doing the things we want to do, whether starting a business, writing a book, or some other calling or act of courage.
It is probably a safety mechanism, maybe an outdated one. But now it stands between us and who we could be.
And this matters. As Pressfield says, a good rule of thumb is: the more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel towards pursuing it.
Using this mental model changed how I saw everything, and allowed me to stop being ruled by these voices of Resistance: if Pressfield and Lawrence Olivier and Liz Gilbert felt Resistance, then the voice inside me doesn’t have anything to do with my creativity or my ability. So I’d better just dance the dance with Resistance anyway.
As soon as I started teaching Resistance, a question started to arrive: how do I know if the voice I’m hearing or the story I’m telling myself is Resistance, or is a sensible reluctance to do something that isn’t right for me?
The answer to Resistance is - so says Pressfield - turning pro. That is, turning up each day and doing the work, regardless of the level of Resistance you feel.
If that’s the case, the question becomes: is it Resistance to the creative task I’m feeling, or is it just not right for me to bloody-mindedly push through on a thing that’s wrong for me?
Now in a provocative mood I might say: now those questions, they are fantastically complex Resistance. They are among the most devious and sly ways of keeping people where they are, protecting them from the potential they could become. Resistance stories up there with the best and most ingenious of them.
But there’s genuine question here, and I was reminded of it clearly recently when at an event with my coach, Rich Litvin. Someone asked him, ‘How do I know if this is my intuition, or a story I’ve made up?’
In a perfect response, without missing a beat, Rich said something like: ‘That’s easy. Your intuition is never making you feel bad or small.’
Intuition is never making you feel bad or small. Fear on the other hand…
That brought to mind for me a distinction I learned from Robert Holden, another of my mentors. Robert would ask: is it Fear talking, or is it Wisdom?
What’s interesting, as Robert said and I found out by using this question with clients: people mostly know.
People mostly know if it is Fear talking or Wisdom.
And if you don’t, here’s the way to distinguish them: Wisdom never makes you feel bad or small.
Fear, on the other hand… those can be its tools. To keep you small, to keep you feeling bad, in order to keep you safe.
But here’s the problem: you are safe. Your life is not at risk if you change in the way your Fear and Resistance thinks it is.
Fear and Resistance evolved for another time.
But what is at risk is your future: is the sense of who you could be, is the work you could do in the world if you could step through the looking glass, cross the threshold and become the bigger version of you that is waiting.
As you do this, you will feel Resistance.
It will ask you devious questions and say exactly the things to you that keep you safe, and small, and away from that thing that is calling you.
And the game is: learn to recognise it for what it is.
Develop a very low tolerance for your own bullshit.
Listen for your intuition instead, for the moments your Wisdom speaks through you.
Let them guide you on the path.
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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.