What we Resist

Hope Lab Tonight at 5pm Pacific!

Happy Hope Lab day, friends!

Tonight we’re continuing our summer exploration of identity, values and - apparently, and as always - resistance.

Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash

If you read Unbroken, or The Joy Reset, or if you’ve ever talked to me ever, you know that I think one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is to tune into what we are resisting. Resistance always has important information for us - sometimes critical information.

What does resistance look like? Something like this: when you open your laptop to pay a bill and suddenly decide today is the perfect day to reorganize your pantry. Or you tell yourself you'll have that difficult conversation "after this week" for six consecutive months. Or you buy the vegetables with the very best intentions and then watch them quietly become compost in the crisper drawer. What do we typically do with resistance? Use it to flog ourselves. That’s where the mistake is. Because resistance isn't laziness. It's data. Maybe pushing your bill paying back is a way of feeling like you have a sense of agency over your financial life. Maybe you are delaying having that tough conversation because you need someone to help you figure out exactly what you want to say first. Maybe the veggies rot in the crisper drawer because you’re trying to eat better to lose weight and you feel resentful about having to uphold a beauty standard that was set by people who pursue pre-pubescent girls. See? Look how much data is in the resistance? When we resist something, we put a tremendous amount of power behind that pushback. It’s important to think about why.

There are - as usual - many layers to this and 100 ways to think it through so we can’t sort it on a single zoom call. But we can make some progress. Tonight we’re borrowing a framework from Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies to help us make sense of some of that resistance. I don’t want to give away the framework before we meet (where’s the fun in that?), but at its heart is a simple and incredibly useful question: How do you respond to expectations - both the ones other people place on you and the ones you place on yourself?

It turns out that understanding how we tend to respond to those expectations can explain an astonishing amount about why certain strategies work beautifully for some people and completely fall apart for others.

As always, I want to offer my standard disclaimer. This framework is a lens. A way of looking at things. It is not a personality quiz, and it is not a permanent identity. For the love of all that is good and holy - can we just not?

Like everything we do in Hope Lab, this is not about putting yourself in a box, reducing yourself to a label, or discovering the One True Category that explains your entire existence. Human beings are gloriously more complicated and nuanced than that. This is about context. It’s about understanding some of the context around our own resistance so we can work with ourselves instead of launching yet another shame campaign against our own nervous systems.

Because, as you may have noticed, self-loathing has an absolutely terrible success rate as a motivational strategy.

I’ll see you tonight at 5:00 PM Pacific. Link below for all paying members of The Hope Circuit. Bring your curiosity, your resistance, and your openness. We’re going to get nosy about it together.