Search For, And Delight In, Resistance

Hey there. It's me, Kore. Welcome to Exercising Self-Control: From Fitness to Flourishing.

So today I want to talk about how you need to face resistance. That you need to actually try to find resistance and face it directly to grow in strength. The resistance when encountered while moving toward your goals is actually what you want.

For example, lifting weights—the heavier the weights, within reason, the number of repetitions you do and all that kind of stuff has to be calculated. But you need to challenge how strong you are now to become stronger down the road.

And this applies both physically and mentally.

So anytime you grapple with resistance and overcome it, whether from outside—lifting weights—or your own internal sources—your doubts, your fears—getting past that comfort zone, you become stronger and more capable.

It's the resistance that you encounter in your own thinking, actually, that is most important to challenge. And if you can find those doubts, those voices in your head, a lot of people refer to them that way—just the thoughts that pop up as you are working toward a goal. Find a way to deal with them. There are many different ways and different ideas of how to do this.

One, if you ever saw that movie, A Beautiful Mind, with Russell Crowe, who portrayed a mathematician, I think. He was schizophrenic and he had these delusions of people telling him to do things. And he had to learn how to ignore those, in quotes, “people” because they weren't real.

But he couldn't tell that they weren't real, but he learned that they weren't. And then he basically just taught himself to ignore them until they stopped talking. And this was Hollywood, so I didn't read the book and I don't know the actual facts behind this, but we can do the same things.

We can just think, “Okay, that's a thought in my head. That's interesting,” and then just carry on. Just do what it was that you had planned.

And another way is you can not argue with the thinking but analyze it—try to figure out: “Is that reasonable to think like that? Are there other ways to look at this situation? Am I completely useless?” If that's what the voice in your head is saying. And I'm not saying it's in your head. Maybe it's in mine. 🤔 Either way, again, if, and I'm saying voices, but if the thoughts are coming up with one version of an interpretation, what are the counterarguments to that? Or is there evidence to actually have confidence in your own skill or in your ability to learn?

When you face the resistance, if you can create the habit to actually look forward to it. To maybe have the attitude of, “Okay, perfect, this is what I've been looking for. Yes! This is the moment. It's for this that I've been training.” And you kind of start to look forward to those challenges because you look back and you think, “I've overcome all those other ones [challenges]. I'm going to overcome this. I'm going to figure out a way, either through it, around it, over it.” Whatever the metaphor is that you want.

And when the going gets tough, you actually might find yourself smiling. And then you know that you are about to become stronger, to condition yourself to move beyond any current limitation that you imagine you might have.

So what I'm saying is look forward to those moments. Try to find them. Don't be like a lot of people who try to avoid them. Instead, become even more engaged when those moments arrive. Get more involved, more determined. Search for them with a passion.

And when you encounter the resistance, you're just going to bask in that moment and take it on. Understanding that's where the difference comes. That's where you start to make that distinction that “This is perfect. This is exactly where I want to be. This is what's going to make me stronger.”

Like when you're doing a very simple exercise, a bicep curl, for example, and the weight starts to feel heavy. And you can maybe feel that repetition speed on the verge of starting to slow down. “All right, I've got to dig deep now. Concentrate. Focus. This is it. This is when I'm getting stronger.”

As opposed to, “Oh, this is getting a little tough, I better put this down.” That's not how that works.

That's it for today. Catch you next time.

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