My definition of resistance is anything, in us or in our life, that pushes back when we try to move forward.

When it happens, it’s so easy to feel like resistance is “your fault” no matter where it’s coming from. But there’s a very subtle category of resistance that LOOKS like it coming from inside you, but it’s NOT actually yours.

It’s what I’ve come to call “ancestral resistance” or “ancestral programming”.

And it’s VERY hard to spot until you know to look for it.

A dear friend of mine called in distress a few days ago and she’s given me permission to share a bit of her story to illustrate this . (I’m often the one my friends call when the SH*T hits the fan, because I can see through it to what’s going on underneath and help them navigate a path out of it.)

When we first spoke, it looked like she was days from being evicted from her home and it seemed like her worst fear was coming true -
“It’ll all be taken away from me”.

When I heard her say that, it rang a little bell inside me, and I said “Do you think that’s your fear or does it go back farther than you?”

Suddenly, she realized it was her grandmother’s fear.

In a flash, so many things about her grandmother AND her mother made sense to her. Why they held on to things so tightly; why they were so protective; their constant vigilance even in good times, etc.

And then she saw it all in herself.

How tightly she was holding on to a run down house she knew wasn’t her right place to be.

How, every night when she went to work, she was afraid she would find out that they didn’t need her the next day.

How this fear running through her life and her mother’s family was about to become a self-fulfilling prophecy in her eviction.

That’s how “ancestral” programming works.

By influencing our thoughts, feeling, words and actions, this type of internal programming eventually causes us to repeat the very pattern that our ancestors lived out.

But how do we acquire them?

We don’t carry family fears in our DNA, do we?

No, they’re not hanging around in your genetic material – although having similar genes to your ancestors makes it easier for you to follow in the footsteps of their thoughts, emotions and actions.

You can think of ancestral resistance or programming as something we pick up almost by osmosis – meaning it’s as though it’s in the very air we breathe around the dinner table as children.

Later in life, we find ourselves saying the things our parents and grandparents said; expecting the same kinds of things they expected; reacting to situations in the same ways – EVEN WHEN WE TRY NOT TO!

That’s the real kicker here!

These programs operate unconsciously and that’s why they’re SO hard to spot…we think they’re US.

That’s what makes my friend’s realization so important.

FINALLY, she saw through this fear and knew that it wasn’t hers…in fact, it wasn’t even ABOUT her.

That’s the first BIG relief people experience, when we’re working together and we uncover an ancestral program that’s creating resistance in their life.

Oh, thank GOD, it’s not ME!

That realization immediately ends the criticism and “wondering what’s wrong with me” cycle.

Then, we took a moment to breathe together in this new understanding and the knowing that it wasn’t her truth. That allowed her to take a few steps back from the whole experience and see it in a more objective way.

I also did a little energy work with her to take the stress off the situation and get her out of her fear brain and back into her heart again.

Then she remembered the LOVE.

She remembered that she’d always wished her mother and grandmother could’ve had an easier life and could’ve had the freedom to pursue their dreams the way she is now.

Together, we remembered that we have the power to end these ancestral programs and in doing so, redeem the lives of our ancestors and their un-lived possibilities by fully living into our own.

She said could feel her grandmother and great-grandmother cheering.

She could also feel the fierce love in her own heart. A love that was willing to stand in a new truth and end the old cycle – as much for them as for herself.

I left her with some homework to do to clear the last remains of the old beliefs and the fear she’d been feeling and then we hung up.

The next day she called to tell me how it went.

Once she’d done her homework, she said that when she sat down and calculated everything, it turned out she had most of the money she needed to keep from being evicted after all!

She just couldn’t see it before, because the old  family fear was so overwhelming.

That’s what happens when we get out from under old family fears and programs. We can finally live the truth of our own hearts instead of just repeating the cycle without even realizing it.

So if you’re up against a big fear or resistance that you think is yours…it might not be after all.

Can you see any places in your own life where ancestral resistance or programming has been running the show? Or is this pure hogwash? Join the discussion in the comments below.

So many things in life get better when we just do a little “work” on them…

…like the yard, the car, our taxes, the kitchen counter, the cluttered closet, etc.

So how come with resistance, its the reverse?

I got an email the other day from someone in The Heart’s Voice community telling me how their resistance seems to have gotten “worse” ever since they started trying to “work” on it.

Here’s the deal:

Most of your resistance is trying to protect you from something.

This isn’t true of ALL your resistance.

(My current research is showing me that some resistance is just your brain’s way of saying “I don’t have a neural pathway for that yet.”)

But MOST  of your resistance is coming from your wise and noble defence system and it’s VERY protective of you.

And like any good defender, when something or someone tries to get past it, what does it do?

It defends harder!

In fact, this “push back” mechanism is a great way to tell if your resistance is the protective kind or not.

If your resistance gets stronger when you try to get past it, you’re up against your defence system – and likely an imprinted fear or experience.

If it doesn’t work harder or push back, you’re probably working on something new that just needs more practice or more neural pathways built for it.

So what to do about the push back?

I tell all my clients that the first step is to stop pushing.

But I’m not saying to give up or let go of your intention for change.

The only way to break this impasse – and avoid totally exhausting yourself with all the pushing – is with new insight and understanding.

Know that the push back is for a good REASON!

Even if you can’t possibly imagine there being any good reason for it.

Choose to trust that your own deeper wisdom is expressing itself through your resistance. And then seek it out, instead of fighting to control and subdue it.

Get curious, ask it questions, journal with it, dance it, go for a walk with it, talk to it (always with kindness!).

Make space for it as a valued member of your “inner team” – but at the same time, hold your intention and don’t let your defence system run the show.

You know I’ll never tell you to “just” get to the bottom of it – because I hate that kind of advice and there’s WAY more to uncovering these reasons that I could possibly share in a blog post.

But a simple shift from pushing to welcoming, from frustration to curiosity or from control to willingness can have surprising consequences.

Give us your thoughts and questions on why resistance pushes back and how you deal with it. Leave a comment below!

 In 2004, I came across a book that changed my life .

Looking back  now, I like to say that the book “outed me” in a way I’d never experienced before. While I was reading it I kept having the same thought, over and over, “How does he KNOW this about me?!”

Click the image to grab it from Amazon

The book, Your Own Worst Enemy – Breaking the Habit of Adult Under-Achievement, written by Dr. Ken Christian, thoroughly explores all the ways that we habitually limit ourselves and gradually create lives of settling for just a little, or sometimes a LOT less than we’re capable of. (And he delves fully into the way our school systems helps create this, too.)

Ken coined the term SLHPP’s which stands for “Self-limiting High Potential Persons”, as his work and research showed him that its the brightest among us who tend to do the most self-limiting.

This is where my inner cringing began.

He then goes on to describe 12 very distinct self-limiting styles such as “stop-shorts”, “floater-coasters”, “self-doubters”, “rebels”, “checkmates”, “extreme non-risk-takers” and “extreme risk-takers”.

When I saw my exact self-limiting style described EXACTLY in his pages, I knew that my days of hiding were over. (I was a very clear “stop-short” with low-risking tendencies.)

At the time, I was already engaged in very deep training with my own teachers in growing my awareness and my ability to work with any pattern or “program” I encountered in myself. So I brought these same skills I’d learned to the patterns Ken was showing me in the book.

In hindsight, this was the beginning of my work with, and deep study of resistance.

By 2009, I had developed an effective process including a map of resistance and the biological mechanisms behind it, and distilled that down into a distinct series of steps that could be facilitated and taught to others.

Somewhere along the way, I think I said to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could tell all this to Ken Christian?”

Well my full circle moment has arrived!

In a moment of complete serendipity, a good friend and former coaching client of Ken’s contacted him in early March of this year to point him to my website, where his book was being proudly promoted in my sidebar.

And, because of who Ken is, after he’d checked out the whole site, he decided to just pick up the phone and call the contact number he found and say “Hi, thanks for putting my book on your website”.

We talked for an hour and a half!

Somewhere in the middle of that first call, we both had the thought “We should present something together one day.”

And here it is:

On Tuesday, July 26th, at 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern, Ken will be hosting me on a special teleclass for his MaxPotential community called “Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone”.

• How the brain creates resistance
• Why you can never “think” your way out of the Stuck Zone
• What the latest research on brain plasticity can tell us
  about how to get the brain un-stuck
• How you can end the battle with your resistance
• How to eliminate the guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy
  that go with being stuck
• Four words that can help you break any self-limiting pattern
• Why breaking your old habits requires space not time
• The missing ingredient in any action strategy
• The 5 steps that I use to resolve the fears underneath resistance

And I’m sure we’ll get into a bunch more stuff that I can’t even predict right now. That’s just how our discussions tend to go!

Plus, I’ll be sharing some research I’ve uncovered where a California doctor has developed the very same steps I’ve been using on resistance and is using them to treat OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) VERY successfully.

I’ll be sharing why it works and the crucial 5th step that they’re missing.

Even if you can’t be on the call with us live, register at the link below so you can get this recording:

Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone Teleclass

(If you’re reading this post in your email, you might have to go to the website to get a clickable link.)

I truly hope you can join us and …to the friend of Ken’s who had the thought to send him here…I am eternally grateful!!

Last October, as you may have read in my post on The Quickening, I tapped into a big vision.

I felt like I was seeing the future of my work, a whole new level of this dialogue about resistance, and a powerful way to help messengers and change-makers of all stripes lend their voices and energy to the making of a new world.

I felt called. And it felt BIG – way bigger than I could handle.

For days and weeks the ideas poured in and I faithfully wrote down every one.

I was excited at first. SO excited!

And then terrified.

And then I did what many honourable people have done before me…

I fled.

And it wasn’t until I heard myself tell a friend that I’d spent December in “the belly of the whale” that I even realized what I’d been doing. (I often don’t know what I know until it suddenly comes out of my mouth!)

And when I realized I’d been fleeing, my first response was to smile, because in a funny way, it felt like my calling was validated by the fact that I’d joined the ranks of the many noble “flee-ers” that have come before me.

The poster boy for fleeing the call

One of the most famous stories of running away from a calling is the biblical tale of Jonah.

As the story goes, Jonah receives a calling to go to the city of Ninevah to speak to the people there – a task he feels pretty incapable of.

So what does he do?

He promptly flees to the coast and boards a ship to Tarshish instead, thinking he can get out of it. However, he can’t get away so easily.

Divine forces stir up a huge storm to stop Jonah and the sailors figure out that it’s his presence on board that’s putting them all in danger. So they throw him overboard in an attempt to stop the storm and save themselves.

Once overboard, Jonah is promptly swallowed by a whale, where he spends 3 days and 3 nights reflecting on his calling… and his predicament.

In the belly of the whale

This is actually one of the classic stages of the hero’s journey, although not everyone goes through it.

And looking back at what was going on for me through November and December, I’ve come to realize just how important it is!

Here’s just some of what we can be working out during this stage:

• getting a clear picture of what’s being asked of us
• being really honest about our ability to see it through
• taking stock of our strengths and weaknesses
• understanding who we’re going to have to become to answer it
• facing our doubts and fears
• letting go of whatever won’t serve us once we say Yes (old identities, beliefs, habits, clothing, relationships, etc.)
• gathering our strength
• calling in support

It’s both a first test and a time to get ready for what’s next. In fact, I’ve realized that it’s pretty darn useful.

But….

It’s hard to tell this phase from garden-variety stuck-ness.

All we know is that there isn’t a lot of forward movement happening in the “calling” department.

(And I have to say here, that being in this stage doesn’t mean being non-functional. Life goes on and there’s still stuff to be done.)

But we’ve all been taught to value action, progress and productivity SO much that we have a really hard time valuing the very important work that happens at this stage. I certainly got harsh with myself from time to time, even though I had faith that I would, in fact, emerge again.

What makes this section of the journey even harder is that a lot of the work is happening “underground” or subconsciously.

(We often don’t even recognize that we’ve put the brakes on until one day we wake up and wonder where all our enthusiasm went.)

And I strongly suspect that a lot of what’s going on here involves the parts of us that are saying YES to the calling negotiating with the parts of us that are saying NO.

So what does it take to get out of here?

Of course, most of us will want that whale to spit us back out again as soon as possible!

It’s tempting to push ourselves to be complete before we’re ready. But, in doing so, I think we can end up glossing over many things that deserve a bit of contemplation before we leap.

I would venture to say that the one over-arching quality of this stage, when it’s done really well, is:

Honesty

In this space between Yes and No, we can be honest – about the call, about our readiness, about our doubts, fears and needs, about what this is REALLY going to take.

And when we’ve done that, it seems that the obstacles don’t knock the wind out of our sails like they do when we’re not expecting any.

The other things that really helped were:
- holding faith that I WOULD in fact emerge and be ready one day
- remembering my DESIRE to say Yes and take action
- & being present to the process with compassion

Take ALL the time you need

I’ve realized in coming through this process myself, that this stage of the journey doesn’t get a lot of good press or a lot of support from those around us.

It’s definitely NOT cool, sexy, awesome, killer or rockin’ it!

And yet, when we can manage to embrace this time,  it’s rich, profound, illuminating and transformative. It’s like we’re enriching the ground that we’ll grow our new self out of with all the compost of what we’re digesting and discarding in order to be ready.

I can’t point directly to all of the changes that happened in my 8 weeks in the belly of the whale, but I know I’m different.

And even before I emerged, I decided to make a symbolic gesture of YES by painting my home office a glorious salmon colour. So now every time I walk in here, there’s a blazing sunrise going on that reminds me it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life…and I’m feelin’ good!

How about you? Have you spent any time in the “belly of the whale”? Or tried to flee a calling?

I’d love to hear about it, or your questions, comments and outright disagreements. Let’s talk in the comments below!

“Oh, well. I guess it’s back to square one.”

This is a phrase I hear a lot in coaching sessions and I heard it again from a client just last week. It’s almost always said with frustration and regret.

It means that all our good progress has been ruined by a missed action and now we have to start all over again, building our step-by-step pathway from scratch.

I spent years thinking this way and here’s what I say to that now…

Hogwash!

No progress is EVER wasted

When I really GOT this concept, it was the hugest relief to me. I had spent most of my life feeling like I was always going back to square one because I could never seem to stick with my intentions for very long.

And when I look back now at those times, I realize that the story I was telling about starting all over again was actually more damaging to me than any of the missed actions were.

What I wish I knew then was this:

Every action wires up your brain for the next one
(no matter how long that takes)

We often use this “square one” idea as a way to give up on something that we said we’d keep doing for a while. We miss one day of our diet or our writing and suddenly we’re ready to throw in the towel and abandon the whole thing.

But the first thing you need to know is – every time you took action you actually created or strengthened the pathways in your brain and nervous system that would help you to take action the next time.

In a very real way, every time you take an action, you’re physically one step closer to being the person who can do that all the time, effortlessly. You’ll just keep accumulating more brain wiring and better pathways until it’s not hard anymore.

And that wiring does NOT go away just because you miss a day. It’s right there, waiting for you to use it again.

The second big thing you need to know is:

Every choice to go forward digests a little chunk of your resistance

I’m a big fan of celebrating the power of the tiniest choices.

And the choices you make to go towards your dreams and desires really do add up, but it’s hard to see that from day to day.

You see, in the moment when you manage to overcome a doubt in order to take an action, you’ve quite literally transformed the energy of that doubt into the energy of your action.

There is now just a little less doubt, not just in you, but in the world as a whole!

That’s pretty cool!

AND it adds up.

You won’t suddenly feel all your doubt lifted tomorrow. But if you keep acting in the face of your doubt or fear or anxiety, etc, you will very definitely look back in a few weeks or months and realize how much they’ve decreased and how much your power over them has increased.

Our resistance loves to cut and run

I think a big part of why we use this all or nothing way of thinking is that it’s really vulnerable and humbling to fail at something we said we’d persevere with.

We get scared that we won’t have what it takes or that our efforts won’t really get us where we want to go.

That’s a vulnerable place and it tends to bring up past failures, too. And our safety brain would do almost anything to keep us from feeling all that bad stuff.

So it distracts us with anger, frustration and “Never mind. It’s all ruined now. Back to square one.”

So now you can listen to that and say “Thank you for sharing. But my brain is all ready for step 7 now, so I think I’ll do it!”

How has this concept shown up in your life? I’d love to hear your comments and questions below.

And I also want to let you know that I had great fun contributing one of the bonus interviews for the Engaging eCourses progam presented by Kelly Kingman of Sticky eBooks and Pace Smith of the World Changing Writing Course. You can see what all the fuss is about here: Engaging eCourses

You WANT to be taking action on your true desires, but you just can’t seem to get past that invisible wall that’s got you stopped.

Maybe random things just keep getting in the way. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you’re too busy – but that doesn’t make the longing stop.

Or maybe you KNOW you’re sabotaging the very thing you want the most and judging yourself for that is becoming one more reason to avoid it.

Whatever your resistance looks like, you know you simply must get past it if you’re ever going to get to where you really want to be in your life.

And if you’re anything like me, you’ve found that willpower doesn’t work long term – it’s just tiring – and forcing yourself takes all the joy out of something you want to love and not hate everyday.

Get the Skills and Knowledge to Go Past Your Invisible Walls

The Wisdom of Your Resistance is a 5-Week Teleclass program that shows you step-by-step how to track your resistance and enter into a compassionate dialogue with it so you can immediately end the tug of war you’ve been having with yourself.

Your resistance patterns, and all parts of you for that matter, are incredibly wise and with the right training, you can start finding out WHY they’ve been getting in your way so you can give them what they need to get on board and work FOR you.

You’ll be building skills in 6 distinct areas and learning practical techniques you can use anytime, anywhere, to make new choices and keep resistance from taking over.

Plus, you’ll be unlearning a lifetime of judgment and inner criticism and learning brand new positive, heart-centered ways to stay connected to your motivation and desire.

The program includes 5 weekly teleclasses, mp3 recordings and transcripts in case you can’t be there live,  a community support forum, weekly worksheets and pdf guides, a copy of the 15 Minutes to Outsmarting Your Resistance kit and one personal Discovery Session with me.

And you won’t have mountains of homework! This is about doing tiny things through your day that completely transform your inner experience. Our resistance loves to make tasks look like big barriers, so everything will be bite-sized and do-able!

No matter what your obstacles are, you’ll find effective ways to see through them and transform them into good fuel, for progress you can feel great about.

And the brilliant thing about this process is that it’s designed to work even if you’re resisting the program itself!

Personalized Coaching

Whenever you’re dealing with resistance, it’s good to remember that things are being actively hidden and kept buried in your subconscious in order to keep you safe and happy.

That’s why I’m including direct, personal coaching time with me, so you can get straight to the bottom of what’s been blocking you and save yourself years of hunting and struggle.

AND, you’ll have a half-price discount on additional coaching hours for the duration of the 5-week program and for one month after, as well.

Community Support

One of the favorite and most common strategies of resistance is “divide and conquer”. That means your resistance likes it when you’re isolated, cut off from support and thinking you’re the only one who’s feeling this way.

So one of the things I’m the MOST excited about is the community forum that will be a part of this teleclass program.

You’ll be able to get direct feedback from me, but when you get a taste of the support available from the rest of your fellow students that will probably become even more valuable to you.

Together we’ll create a resource for each other filled with wisdom, camaraderie, insight and laughter.

And I’m going to keep it open for an additional month after the program ends so you’ll have a transition time before you start “flying solo” with all your new habits and skills.

Plus, YOU Get to Help Design the Program!

This is the first ever offering of The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program. And because of that, I’m going to be seeking your input and advice on what you need, what order to do things in and what formats will work best for you.

So you get to help me create the program that will work the very best for you!

What’s the Free Offer?

This is actually a moment I’ve been waiting a long time for. I struggled so long with my own resistance that I had moments when I seriously thought I would never really accomplish anything.

And I know from intimate experience that one of the areas resistance likes to go after is money – making sure the resources are never there to get what you need to move forward.

Now, finally, I have the chance to take that limitation off the table for you.

That’s why I’m offering three scholarships to the readers of this blog. The three lucky winners will get the entire program absolutely free. Winners will be notified two days before the course opens to the Early Bird List that they have won their spot in The Wisdom of Your Resistance teleclass program.

How Can You Get in for Free?

To enter to win a free scholarship, here’s what you need to do. At the bottom of this page, add a comment, and tell me:

• What’s your biggest frustration around dealing with resistance and obstacles to your goals and dreams?
• Where would you like to see yourself after The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program? (You don’t have to give specifics if it feels pretty personal – just tell me in a general way.)

Do you have questions about the Wisdom of Your Resistance teleclass? Please let me know those, too! I’m happy to answer them.

Tell All Your Friends

Do you know someone who could benefit from The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program? Click on the Share button below to share it on Twitter and Facebook and wherever you like. You can also use the Retweet button to tweet it out to your peeps.

Remember, you just need to tell me:

• What’s your biggest frustration around dealing with resistance and obstacles to your goals and dreams?
• Where would you like to see yourself after The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program?

And if you have questions, let me know about those, too!

Best of Luck!

Our contest is now closed and congratulations go out to our 3 lucky winners, Eva, LaVonne and Sang-Gye. Thank you all for your participation and comments! For more program info, previews, discounts and access to a FREE Intro Teleclass July 27th @ 8 pm Eastern, just put your name on the Early Bird List.  I’ll also be sending the mp3 recording of the teleclass, entitled “7 Sources of Resistance and How to Make Friends With Them, to everyone on the list!

When you’re dealing with the part of yourself that’s getting in your way, it’s helpful sometimes to grab onto a metaphor - an image or idea - that helps you understand what’s going on.

But what if that metaphor is making things worse?

I read a post a month ago by Marelisa where she did an excellent review of a book by Theodore Bryant called “Self-Discipline in 10 Days: How to Go From Thinking to Doing”. Her post was very well written (and I thank her hugely for the inspiration), but Bryant’s book sums up every single thing that I object to about classic ‘self-discipline” thinking.

And the metaphor he uses for our inner impulses toward action and avoidance of it is, of course, Jekyll and Hyde.

By the time I finished reading the article, I was ranting. When I’d finished my rant, I realized that I had finally summed up the essence of why I believe this traditional view is so un-supportive of our growth.

Today, I want to take apart the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor and show you why it’s so very damaging and why we MUST outgrow it in order to create truly healthy, encouraging relationships with ourselves.

Mr. Hyde is an icon for our fear of what’s inside us.

Most of the people who use the image of Mr. Hyde these days do so pretty lightly. They sometimes paint him as a kind of trickster or mischief or someone who just enjoys going against our decided course of action and messing things up.

But his image is actually much darker.

The reason that Robert Louis Stevenson’s original book was so powerful, and so horribly fascinating, in 1886 was that Mr. Hyde was a character of pure evil with no human mixture of both good and bad. Other characters felt disgust for him immediately without being able to say why.

There’s no middle ground with Hyde. No grey area. He’s all bad and he lurks within. The idea that there might be something that dark in us brings up as much fear now as it did when the book was first published.

And the thing about an icon is that the mere mention of it calls up everything it represents in our subconscious, whether we’re aware of it or not.

So every time we invoke him, we’re telling ourselves there’s something in us to be very afraid of. And that shuts down all our impulses to explore our inner world.

Hyde is also an icon for the “inner enemy”.

This image puts us into a battle with something inside us that we can’t quite see or name.

It creates a constant tension, an “us and them” mentality within our very self that means we need to constantly use our energy to keep up the fight and keep our unknown enemy from winning.

As some of you know, it’s the battle metaphors that really set my teeth on edge when it comes to working with resistance.

And that’s one more reason that I truly hate this image. It consigns us to a lifetime of using up all our energy in a battle with something that will never go away.

So now, let me tell you 2 things very, very clearly:

#1 – NOTHING in you has EVER been your enemy!

Read that again and let it really sink in.

EVERY single impulse you’ve ever had, EVERY action you’ve ever taken, EVERY behaviour you’ve ever engaged in, even the darkest ones you can think of, have been in the service of your ultimate protection, survival and ability to meet your needs and thrive.

There’s nothing in you to fight against.

There are definitely parts of you that believe that going towards your stated desires and intentions won’t be safe for you. And they’ll get in your way if they think they must.

And there are also more instinctive parts of you that might not want to act in accordance with your higher intentions. They’re more like children that simply need a parent around for firm direction.

But what these parts are calling for is deep questioning, compassion and understanding in order to address the buried fears, impulses and safety needs.

As soon as they’re brought into your awarness, you get to meet them in the best way you can and move forward without a battle.

What would it feel like to relax into a deep knowing that every single part of you is working for you and can be trusted and guided?

And what if you knew that, far from trying to mess with you and thwart you, these parts of you actually WANT you to show up in all your loving awareness and bring the guidance and healing they need?

How would that change your relationship with them?

And now for the second place where Hyde misses the mark:

#2 – You have NO bad parts!

Read that again, slowly, and breathe.

You only have qualities that have been buried, wounded or thwarted into less than constructive and beautiful expressions of themselves.

And what they need is not more denial and ignoring. Their thwarted expressions and behaviours begin to transform with even the slightest amounts of love and attention.

But when we grab hold of a metaphor that makes us fear, mistrust and ignore these parts of ourselves, we close down all possibility for real dialogue and healing to happen.

We need a metaphor that encourages exploring and deep inner friendship.

 I’m not sure what that metaphor would be right now, but I sure as heck want to see Jekyll and Hyde replaced permanently!

For me, this quest to understand and guide all the parts of me is really more like a treasure hunt. And the treasure is what our denied parts become when they’re honoured and allowed to find balanced expressions in our lives.

What are your metaphors for YOUR inner parts or your resistance? How do they work for you?

What do you feel when you think of the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor and what would you like to feel about these parts of yourself?

I really want to hear your thoughts and ideas below. Please share a comment! I’d love to see this whole conversation evolve over the next few weeks and months as I share the next installments of “the rant”.

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Oh, no! by Charlie Donahue

Coaches generally tend look forward not back. It’s therapists who dig into the past. And the coaching profession is pretty careful to distinguish themselves from therapists.

My work has evolved exactly at the intersection of coaching and therapy because I’ve discovered that both ingredients are essential when dealing with resistance.

I know plenty of coaches who want to tear their hair out over clients who simply WILL NOT take an assigned or even a self-chosen action, as a part of their weekly homework agreement.

And this illustrates the very essence of the difficulty with resistance.

Many coaches find themselves hugely frustrated and doubting their own abilities when resistance rears up in a client, because nothing they do seems to be able to move the coachee into action.

• Motivation and inspiration don’t work.
• Chiding and disapproval from the coach only make it worse.
• Pointing out the consequences of non-action doesn’t work.
• Cognitive approaches to change thinking aren’t effective
• And behavioral approaches to just change the actions don’t work well either.

In short, the client can’t respond to any of these approaches because, when resistance takes over, they’re no longer in full conscious control of their actions.

When it comes to resistance, we’re dealing with an internal part of us, our amygdala or safety brain, that has the ability to completely switch off our awareness and our thinking brain in order to protect us. This is how we end up standing in front of the fridge with the door open and not quite sure how we got there!

Changing habits or focusing only on current actions doesn’t work here, because before we can even think about it, our thinking gets switched off and we end up suddenly in front of the TV or cleaning the house or something equally distracting.

And we only remember what we had intended to do at times when there’s no way we can actually do it, like just before going to sleep.

I keep recalling what a client said after a session several months ago. She said every time she tried to think about what she wanted to do her brain “just skittered away somewhere.” That’s the safety brain shutting the door to the neocortex and our thinking ability.

Coaching works when it’s just a matter of choosing an action and doing it. No problem.

But, at the moment when resistance surfaces, coaching fails and that’s when therapy works.

Because the whole reason the brain is being shut off is due to a forgotten danger – usually a buried wound or childhood pain. And the protective self is actually working to keep us from the dual hurts of both remembering it and possibly repeating it with our current actions.

And the safety brain is VERY invested in keeping the reasons for its distracting, obscuring behaviour buried.

So when you initially ask yourself what the obstacle is, you’ll almost never get a truthful answer. You’ll get  layers of smokescreen from the mind. (The body and the emotions will be more honest.)

Resistance is so powerful because a part of us is afraid to even remember what’s actually in the way.

This leaves us playing a convoluted game of “guess where the block is” and our safety brain is like the carnie who makes sure the truth is never in the cup we look under.

But when someone makes a strong compassionate container for us (like a coach or therapist), it becomes safe to remember and these buried triggers can actually be healed surprisingly quickly, perhaps in just hours or days, without years of therapy.

And I think that’s what scares people the most, is the idea that any deep remembrance of childhood pain will send us reeling into years of therapeutic interventions. And that’s just not what happens.

Most of the buried events that our safety brain is holding onto can be felt and released very gently and quickly.

They simply need to be processed through our conscious mind.

As soon as we’ve done that, they stop being an invisible boogey-man. I’ve started to think that, once the buried trigger is made conscious, the safety brain can finally relax about trying to warn us about it. Just the way everyone in the room relaxes when a secret finally comes out.

And looking back doesn’t have to mean getting sucked into the quicksand of all our old wounds and issues.

Something I’ve observed over 12 years of working with clients is that this look at the past is most effective WITHIN the context of who we’re becoming and who we’ve come here to be.

This is soul stuff and not everyone wants to go there. But without this context, we can quickly end up bogged down in old hurts,  regrets and “if-only’s”.

The soul perspective acknowledges that every piece of the journey has a purpose and is taking us toward our destination. And connecting with and supporting this evolutionary process keeps us from getting obsessed with our past or stuck in a victim role.

So even though transforming resistance requires a look into our past, it’s not nearly as scary as you might think.

And there’s a deep, deep wisdom underneath each obstacle that will leave you smiling in appreciation of your loving safety brain.

And you can use all that energy that’s been tied up in the struggle as fuel for your journey forward.

..

Where has resistance shown up for you?

I’d love to hear how you’ve experienced resistance in yourself or in those around you. (You can change names to be kind to those you love.) Where are the stubborn places that you’ve been the MOST blocked? Let us know in the comments below.

Garrison Keillor, author of The Prairie Home Companion and host of the radio show of the same name,  said the most brilliant thing about writer’s block, and it sheds a lot of light on the “I don’t feel like it” bug.

He said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that there’s no such thing as writer’s block and that we never, ever hear about surgeon’s block or bricklayer’s block, etc, etc.

Can you imaging a surgeon showing up for work and saying that they can’t operate today, that they just don’t “feel right”?! Never!

Garrison says that writer’s block comes from writers putting pressure on themselves to create at a level beyond their current abilities.

So whatever we’re working on, it’s as though we’re always looking for that “perfect state” that will cause our work to turn out like a master’s, even though our skill level can’t take us there yet. It’s kind of a fantasy, really.

And we have to remember that the masters became masters by showing up to their craft every day no matter how they felt.

I believe that “I don’t feel like it” is often a code phrase that means “I’m afraid this won’t be good enough”.

And then, in order to avoid facing our sense of not feeling like we’re good enough, we buy the reasoning that it’s all because of our current state and if we wait until later we’ll magically be good enough then! (Even though by not doing it now, we’re throwing away any possible chance of improving our skills for “later”.)

That’s some kind of crazy reasoning!

So what to do?

I’ve found 2 things helpful:

1) Get good at being able to sit with the feelings that are sitting just under the surface of “I don’t feel like it.”

Make sitting with the feelings part of your action step on whatever you’re moving towards. Give yourself a time limit at first – no more than 30 seconds, if that’s all you can take. Work your way up to 5  minutes and those feelings will permanently stop holding so much power over you.

2) Slow WAY down and do each step or action as though it’s simply for it’s own sake.

When you get extremely present with what you’re doing at this moment, and you start to notice the subtle sensations and nuances of the task itself, there’s no room to be making moment to moment calculations of whether it’s any good.

And remember, this is supposed to be the thing you love, the thing you want…right?

Lastly, take a good solid look, like Garrison says, at your exact skill level right now and be honest about how good you can expect anything to be at this moment in time. And then let that be completely OK!

And now ask yourself – do I still want to get better at it? And if you do, make a choice to practice or take an action just for the joy of getting better at it.

How has this pressure to be better played out in your life? Share your thoughts, questions and comments below.

And if you missed it, you can still catch the free e-course, called Ignite Your Desires to take full advantage of the energy boost we’re getting this week when the planet Mars goes direct starting late Tuesday.

I’ve been watching a particularly subtle but aggressive form of resistance in myself over the last week or so.

It’s the dreaded “I don’t feel like it” fog. Do you ever get that?

I’ve been studying it for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that it  starts at the crossroads of deep caring and emotional need.

Today we’re going to talk about the caring in Part I, and I’ll show you what I mean about the need in Part II.

So why would caring about something lead to not wanting to do it?

When we care a lot about what we’re doing, we don’t want to put any negative energy or emotions into it. We don’t want to “mess it up”.

I think more and more of us are understanding that the energy we put into things matters and that it actually is felt by others when our creations go out into the world.

And this applies just as much to stuff no one will ever see, like practicing our music at home. The key is – we want it to be GOOD.

So when I sit down at my computer to write a blog post, and I just had a snarky exchange with my husband, well, I don’t want to put any of THAT in my writing. I’m just sure you’ll all feel it!

So in order to put my best work out into the world and share the “right” kind of energy, I’ll be kind to everyone and keep my snarky energy to myself and wait until I’m feeling better to do this. (Which is probably why I didn’t post for 3 weeks!)

So this is really a loving impulse….until your resistance gets a hold of it!

The minute you set up a standard around an action that says you only want to put “good” energy into it, and therefore you’ll do it only when you feel  “good”, you leave the door wide open for your resistance.

Because now, all it has to do to stop you from doing something, is make sure you don’t feel “good”.

And we have to remember that our unconscious safety brain, where our resistance comes from, has control of our thoughts and emotions first, before our conscious brain has anything to say about it. So if your resistance thinks your next action might take you a little out of your comfort zone, it just pulls up a little negative emotion and Voila – action thwarted!

So how do we get around this?

Have you ever watched a child change emotions in about 2 seconds? They can be in full out tantrum one second and then in total wonder over something that caught their eye in the next.

We all have the ability to do that. I was once given an assignment by my teacher to conjure up the states of joy, sadness, fear, anger, grief, anxiety – as many different ones as I could think of in just a few minutes. (She dared us to do it, actually, and I’m always spurred on by a good dare!) And it worked. I had WAY more conscious control over my emotional states than I ever imagined.

I remembered that exercise this past week, watching the “I don’t feel like it” fog roll in and out. So I made a big decision…

I decided that from now on I’m going to choose the state that matches my task, instead of choosing the task that matches my state.

Read that again.

Choose the state that matches your task, instead of choosing the task that matches your state.

When this dawned on me, I realized that I didn’t have to be held prisoner by whatever energy or emotion I happen to be in. So from now on, I choose what I feel like. Or at least that’s what I’m aiming for.

Want to try it with me?….I dare you!

And leave a comment below to let me know how it goes or tell us how your states are affecting what you do in your day.

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