When You Question Yourself, How Do You Know If It's Wisdom Or Resistance?

Your language will tell you

Have you ever caught yourself thinking “I must be f**king crazy to do this”?

It might be writing a book or starting a business or embarking on a few months of travel.

You want to do it. You’ve planned towards it for a long time. You are inexplicably driven to do it. In your heart you know it’s right but there’s a lot of voices in your head having major doubts and a panic.

“Am I mad?” you keep asking yourself.

My experience

I observed this in myself four years ago, when I decided to take a break from my day job as an IT consultant. In the previous year I had struggled with anxiety and overwhelm. Deep down, I knew that I had to stop. Eventually, a minor explosion went off in my head. I literally sat and rocked back and forth at my computer. It was my ‘game over’ point and I had no choice but to take that break.

However, as I was working out my notice period, determined to leave my job on good terms, the voices started.

“Really – you’re going to walk away from a good job in the middle of a pandemic when so many people are losing theirs? Really?”

“You’re gonna write the sequel to a book which hasn’t exactly been a bestseller? Who the hell is going to read it?”

“You’re making all these sacrifices for a creative whim? Are you f**king crazy?”

The language pattern of resistance

I noticed that there was a pattern to the language of those voices. Resistance sows doubt.

“Am I crazy?” – that’s resistance.

“I must be mad to do this.” – also comes from doubt. That’s resistance.

In contrast, when you know something really isn’t a good idea, your wisdom tells you this in a definitive way. “This is crazy.”

You might have to spend some time weighing up various possibilities. When an option is genuinely unwise you make the decision and say “that would be mad” or “that would be unwise” or “that would be stupid.”

Do you see the difference? There are no questions or woolliness when wisdom is speaking. The statements are direct, matter of fact.

But when resistance speaks, it questions.

“Am I crazy?”

“Who the hell am I to think I could do that?”

“This book has been written a hundred times. What can I add to the discussion? Why bother?”

Resistance loves doubts

Resistance loves to tie your mind in knots, to make you doubt yourself. Resistance comes from your small ego. When it sees what your soul wants, it goes into a fearful panic.

It has good intentions. It wants you not to get hurt. But the only way it knows how to do that is to shut you down from taking any risks. It will do anything to protect you.

One way it can try to stop you pursuing your deeply felt desire is to turn up those pesky voices.

Looking back, I was absolutely right to take that break. Both my mind and body needed it. It turned out that my body needed a lot of rest and for me to live in a completely different way. It plunged me into chronic fatigue so that I would learn a kinder, more loving way to live.

Now, as I’m coming out of that, and into a new phase of life, those resistance voices are back.

“You really think you can be a coach again?”

“With your mother in hospital and your husband with his brain injury? Really?”

I recognise it as the voice of resistance. That’s how I know to keep going, in my gentle way of course.

Plodding gently

Cali x

P.S. If you know someone who’s currently in a quandary, please share this post with them.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash