From: Craig Maloney Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:59:51 +0000 (-0400) Subject: Taking about resistance X-Git-Tag: 0.3.0^2~5 X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=8a15a71ed6a77195c9b85fed96e3269e8582ecdd;p=themediocreprogrammer.git Taking about resistance --- diff --git a/chapter06.md b/chapter06.md index 8b1ffa1..fe05aa6 100644 --- a/chapter06.md +++ b/chapter06.md @@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ If you're finding that the topic you're looking to learn is no longer interestin Treat this as an iterative process, with regular check-in periods to see how you're doing. Think about how you feel when you're learning. Are you excited and engaged or do you feel tired and withdrawn? Do you try to procrastinate when you think about this topic? When you are focusing on your learning does your mind wander? Note these feelings as they occur to you during your focusing sessions and come back to them when you think about your learning process. -## Resistance +## Resistance and The Container Any time we learn new things we put ourselves into a vulnerable and uncomfortable place. We take the things we are familiar with and push into new territory. We become uncertain of the outcome; will it be successful or will it be a failure? Will it help us or hurt us? Will we choose the wrong thing to learn and will it cost us opportunities in the long run? @@ -49,4 +49,10 @@ Discomfort and uncertainty are certainly a part of learning, but rather than thi We've been conditioned over our human existence to think of the unknown as something to be feared. These emotions have served us well and have kept us from venturing too far out of our comfort zone. When the unknown can house all sorts of dangers it makes sense not to provoke them by showing up on their doorstep. But programming is not the same as venturing into a dark forest or peeking into a damp cave; programming hardly warrants the amount of fear we give it. Instead we need to realize that we're not in any mortal danger and our fears are merely letting us know that we're venturing into the uncharted territory of ignorance where we shall find understanding. -(talk about learning, feelings, and resistance to new learning. Talk about the discomfort of learning new things) +Steven Pressfield in _The War of Art_ nicknamed these feelings "resistance". He uses the term "Resistance" as a sort of mythological being that thwarts creative acts. As the work progresses The Resistance ratchets up the pressure to stop by introducing the feelings of fear and anxiety that we mentioned above. I think of Resistance as something that also happens whenever we trend toward learning more to help foster creative acts. For creative folks this is about achieving a creative work (book, painting, game, etc.) but in our case we're learning the tools to help us be more creative. Resistance is what tells us that we're not good enough or not worthy enough to learn these things. It tries to keep us safe in what we already know. + +This is part of why the focus container that we mentioned before is so important: it gives is small doses of discomfort in manageable chunks. We can see our way through a few minutes of discomfort daily and keep at it. And if we focus on one thing at a time we can keep ourselves from the distracting thoughts about whether or not this is the thing we should be working on; at this moment this is exactly what we should be working on. Whatever is in front of us to learn is what we should be learning. We can be secure that for however long the container is that everything we are doing at this moment is exactly as it should be, and when we finish the container we can reassess how it went and where we should go from here. + +## Mapping out longer-term goals + +(Discuss how to learn over longer periods, the power of small projects, and how to keep learning)