The prescription you are about to receive to address how to respond to such moments may sound counter-intuitive, but here it is: Ignore the call or urge to fight the feeling.
Not only is fighting the feeling unreliably ineffective, it can be counter-productive, delivering the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish with the fight.
You'll recall from the Frameworks for Focus piece the suggestion to deploy a simple yet powerful approach to give you yourself permission to do "nothing", with the condition that you list out contents of your mind (into your in-basket or journal). In addition to having your in-basket for receiving thoughts and tasks before you, you'll find it useful to set your attention not to the tasks you are trying to accomplish but to what can be called enablers of what you are trying to accomplish.
Think of enablers as actions or activities that ease you into what your are trying to accomplish.[1]
Say you are trying to sleep. You probably know that telling yourself to sleep NOW will fail to deliver sleep to you. But if you read a casual book or counted the tapping of your finger to 1,000 you may regain consciousness to find that sleep arrived and departed without a fight—or deference to your will or command.
Having your in-basket for receiving thoughts and tasks before you is one enabler of making progress, so is executing the Values Releasing Question protocol. But there is more.
Still in the context of applying effort to realize progress, here are 5 notable progress enablers:
- Pour out words.
- Break tasks into smaller (if not smallest) action steps.
- Play Music.
- Set a timer to run for the duration before you are to take a break.
- Go sit at work desk
Place feet on the ground > Sit up from couch > Walk to work desk > Sit at work desk > Turn on computer > Set timer to 90 minutes.
Of course, the enablers you deploy at any given moment will be determined by the tasks which sit high in your priorities list and time blocks. But the five enablers already mentioned tend to deliver devasting cracks to the walls of resistance you might encounter at most moments.
Notes:
If there’s one thing you take away from this piece, let it be this: when resistance shows up—those heavy moments when your response to the day’s demands is simply “I don’t feel like doing anything”—don’t fight it. Instead, lean into action enablers.
Notes:
- It’s worth noting that there are other important forces that support progress—like earning money, eating right, or exercising regularly. But these are broader, more complex activities that extend beyond the scope of simple enablers. It's better to consider them as a separate category based on their function, say sustainers—habits or systems that maintain your capacity over time—while enablers serve to unlock momentum in the moment. Both are crucial, but they operate at different layers. So, while sustainers deserve their own space and structure, when you’re in the thick of resistance, it’s the enablers that get you unstuck.
Explore more like this piece in the How To Deal With Resistance Series
PhotoSource: https://www.happiness.com/
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