Turn Resistance into High-Level Productivity

Welcome back to The make time for success podcast. This is episode number 38. What's the best thing to do when you feel like it just don't have it in you. You don't have it in you to do more, you don't have it in you to finish your paperwork. You don't have it in you to try to find your missing willpower. I am sharing this particular episode with you to respond to those questions to give you those answers and as a love letter to you, during this time that Amy Cuddy and Jill Ellen Riley, have described as pandemic flux syndrome, pandemic flux syndrome is where many of us are caught right now in a holding zone, where our anxiety is active. And our energy is somewhat limited by the mix of hopefulness that we feel and have about the future, and also our lack of certainty about what lies ahead. Inside this episode, I'm going to describe how to get out from under your feelings that you want to resist everything, and how to get into that feeling of flow as much as you can again, let's go listen to the episode now. Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped 1000s of people move past procrastination and overwhelm. So they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast if you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together, so that you can focus on what's really important, and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy, and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the make time for success podcast. So today, I would like to talk about our capacity to fight what is in front of us. And also I would like to describe some ways I have learned to stop the fighting so that things can be so much later in life. So what are the ways in which we fight, we can fight homework, we can fight home chores, we can fight having conversations that need to happen, we can fight paying bills, we can fight getting to the gym, we can fight having to face realities that we don't like, like people leaving us or things not going the way we had hoped. But before I go on with this, I'm going to ask you to take a moment and observe within yourself what just came up in your mind and heart. When I started talking about the topic of fighting? What might you be trying to fight now? What are you trying to resist? There's so many different ways and things that we can fight. one clue to help you to figure out what you're fighting is to think. What are you worried about? What are you trying to put off? What puts an uncomfortable feeling in your chest or your gut when you think about it. Great, thank you for taking the time to do that little thought and feeling experiment with me. Now that you know what you might be trying to fight. Let's have you now open up let's open up your mind to the idea that this may not actually be a fight between you and the homework, chores and the gym. It actually may be a fight between what you know needs to happen. And you're competing need to stay safe and comfortable without having to do anything extra. Again, it's not really the homework that's bothering you. It's really that conflict within yourself, between your desire to have something change, and your desire to have things stay absolutely the same, so that you don't have to expend any extra energy. When we talk about procrastination, we often make it about the homework, the chores and the gym, that it's so difficult, that it's making us feel frustrated that we just feel like we don't have it in us. But the problem again isn't the task of the homework, the chores or the gym. It's really about our resistance to the task. So now that I've explained that piece of the puzzle, I'm I'm going to share the rest of what I know, I have come up with three things that really worked for me, to help me to overcome my own resistance whenever I feel it. And the good news is, these three things are not hard at all. The first thing that I say to myself is, Resistance is futile. futile, I don't actually know how to pronounce out, but I'm gonna say a few times, Resistance is futile, because I know that the homework needs to get done, the chores need to get done, the gym needs to see my presence in the gym needs me to be there. So I just remind myself whenever I feel that uptick in wanting to fight, wanting to resist what I want to do, I just remind myself that resistance is futile is just a big waste of my time, I'm going to end up doing these things. Anyway. The second thing that I tell myself is that I don't want my body and mind to be full of fighting, I don't want my body and mind to be a battleground, I don't want to fill my days with tension. And I don't want to fill my body with that either. I don't want to stress myself out physically. The third thing that I tell myself is something that I know that when I stopped with the fighting within myself, I ended up having tons more energy, and more energetic space to actually do the thing that I was originally resisting. To repeat, I know. And I tell myself, that when I stopped the fighting, all of a sudden, I have the space, the room and the energy to actually do what is needed. So one way that I can teach you this in another way is to have you envision this as a picture, I want you to envision going for a walk in the woods. Typically, when you go into the woods, you would choose a nice, clear path, it might be narrow, but you would want it to be kind of clear, and kind of prickle free, and you would want to enjoy that walk, you wouldn't look for a path that was filled with twigs and brush to interrupt your path or to make your walk difficult. And you certainly wouldn't want to throw twigs and brush in front of you to purposefully mess up your experience, right? So I want you to think to yourself, what would it be like if you stopped putting resistance? In your day? What if you stopped resisting every task that wasn't perfectly easy for you? What if you just made it a clear path in the woods for yourself instead? Now I'm going to have you think about another image or another vision. And this time, I would like you to envision that you're walking on a red carpet, and the carpet is rolling out for you as you walk forward. It is a beautiful velvet carpet, it's clean, it's a wrinkle free. It's a gorgeous color red. That is the image that I would love for you to keep inside your head as a little template for how things can feel for you, when you're taking a new action. Even when you're taking action on difficult tasks. You want to have that feeling that things are going your way that things are beautiful, that things are smooth, and you don't want to mess up your own path. Give yourself a pleasant experience. Don't make the road ahead of you messy and tricky anymore. I promise you that these techniques will make things easier for you. You will still have to expend energy, of course to get things done, but no longer will you have to be struggling inside yourself for an hour, two hours a week or a month anymore. Just to get started. You will have that roll of red carpeting ready to roll out for your own benefit. As soon as you start this exercise of changing up your resistance. So basically what I'm suggesting is that we all stop forcing ourselves to do things. Let's stop the pushing and that drama And the difficulty of thinking everything is so hard. Most things are not that hard when you think about it really resist even the little things, but things are not that hard. But I want to tell you that resistance is always hard resistance is by definition hard. It makes us work against our own energy, and that is 100%. Hard. So instead of resisting, let's ask ourselves these questions, what would happen if there were no resistance anymore? What if I didn't project my fears onto what I'm supposed to be doing next anymore? What would happen? What if I assume that the result I want is already on its way to me? What if I don't fight and think that everything is going to collapse? What would my results look like? If I didn't put up a fight or resist them? Would they be bigger? Would they be better? Would they be brighter? Would they come more easily? So my friends, I just gave you the secret for choosing focus, and empowerment, over being overwhelmed. Instead of fighting things. Let's get in the game. Let's get on that rolling red carpet and let's get to work. But I need to let you know that you need to make room in your heart and your mind for this new idea to really work, you have to believe that you are deserving of an easier time of it. You have to believe that your current way of doing things may not be the best strategy for you. You have to believe that you are capable of handling anything that is in front of you. And coming your way you have to believe that you can take care of yourself no matter what is going to happen. You have to believe that your energy is too precious to be wasted on fighting little tasks, medium sized tasks, and even the bigger tasks and that it's too precious to be wasted on resisting your own success. So take this new mindset and these new tricks out for a spin today. I would love to hear how they help send me a direct message on Instagram at procrastination coach. My handle again is procrastination coach, and let me know what you had been resisting. And what happened when you drop that resistance. What happened when you felt like you were going to skip the beginning stage of fighting and difficulty and envisioning negative outcomes. And instead just got right into it and started walking on that red carpet. I cannot wait to hear what you have to say. See you back here next week. And thank you so much for tuning in to the make time for success podcast by Thank you for listening to this episode of The make time for success podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website make time for success podcast.com for past episodes, show notes and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to end let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.