Conquering Your Inner Resistance
Nine times failure, means nine times effort.
— Dalai Lama
If we want to make significant changes in our lives we also have to embrace the difficult work that lies ahead of us. Whether you want to lose weight, get over a fear of flying, get a degree, or quit your job and run away and join the circus.
I always think it's a good idea to take baby steps towards a goal if you are trying to make big lifestyle changes - like trying to focus on losing the first 5 pounds or being able to meditate for 5 minutes. At some point you can count on the resistance kicking in and you will start to sabotage yourself. You tell yourself that you are wasting your time or that your accomplishments don't add up to much at all.
Keeping up your motivation is tough, but even harder than that is overcoming the wish that we didn't have to change in the first place. We fool ourselves into thinking that other people are thin because they are naturally skinny and don't have to watch what they eat or that successful people had lucky breaks or are naturally talented rather than they worked their butts off perfecting their skills.
It just isn't true (read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers for plenty of examples). I hate to tell you but most big projects require some hard work and ups and downs. We make our work harder when we wish there was an easier way or if we could somehow magically ensure that all of our hard work will pay off. It takes us twice as long to get the job done — and we are miserable while we are trying to do it.
I know this first hand from many, many experiences - but the worst time was in grad school when I probably spent a year longer getting my Ph.D. than I should have because I hated working on a comprehensive (means stupidly big) paper on a topic I wasn't interested in that was required for my degree. At one point, my supervisor laughed and told me, "This paper isn't just a monkey on your back — it's a gorilla."
Recognizing this is powerful. Now you can tell yourself that you are having a moment and it will pass. You can remind yourself of all the reasons that you want to move closer to your goals. You can develop a plan to help you overcome your obstacles and teach yourself to talk to yourself in a way that keeps you going rather than tears you down.
If nothing else, it does feel better to try and fail than it does to sit on the couch and eating a pint of ice cream.