How to know when resistance is stopping your success

Everyone encounters resistance in business. In simplest terms, resistance is a fear response to doing something. Most entrepreneurs have not figured out how to work with the resistance that shows up for them.

Try on this paradigm: whenever you have something that is hard (feels like struggle) and you want to make it easy and you’re having difficulty, it’s because you are resisting something. Your fear is interfering with your ability to make that thing easy.

Let’s use money as an example. If you are struggling with making more money in your business, and you can’t figure out how to make it easy you are resisting something.

Most likely, you are resisting the belief system that it could be easy to make money.

The more money you make the easier it is to make money because you embed the belief within yourself that it is easy.

You have to stop focusing on it being hard.

If you are asking yourself right now, but what if it doesn’t work? Or saying to yourself that it can’t really be easy to make money then what’s going on is:

You are giving your power to something outside of yourself.

The real question you are asking yourself is, “What if I don’t work?”

If that is true for you, you want to do whatever it takes to get VERY clear about your fear.

Resistance - which is a fear response - can show up in all kinds of creative ways. It is your ego trying to keep you safe. And the way the ego keeps you safe is by keeping you the same.

The ego freaks out when you begin to do anything new. Your survival instincts freak out like a toddler freaks out.

You can’t transform just the ego - tap your resistances away, blast through your limiting beliefs; you can’t just heal your way through your survival instincts.

The most powerful thing you can do to move forward is just accept that this is part of your transformational process. When you start to do something new your survival instincts will kick in and you will encounter resistance. It’s really powerful to just acknowledge that process and not try to change it.

One of the favorite tricks of the ego is to make you think you are beyond resistance. You are NOT. 

If you have a pattern of starting and stopping and not following through your ego is going to be pretty convinced it can stop you (because it has in the past!).

If we don’t understand ego resistance, we misinterpret it, doubt it, or think it’s not our path. We tell ourselves that ‘the universe doesn’t want us to’, ‘this must not be what we actually want’, and ‘there must be something wrong with us’.

This is really toxic pattern that I see with a lot of conscious entrepreneurs — the stop and start pattern of thinking there is something wrong with you immediately followed by the story that you have to stop what you’re doing and dive into what is wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you if you are in resistance. 

Thinking that there is something wrong is exactly what your ego wants. Your ego wants to stop you or distract you by telling you that you need to go on a whole healing path to try and heal yourself. Your ego can stop you and detour you every time you head into resistance. That is its job: to keep you the same.

And, to be honest, when you start asking what is wrong with you, you will always get an answer!

Resistance does not mean there is anything wrong.

Resistance means that transformation is straight ahead. In fact, the more resistance you are in, the more transformation is happening!

Greater resistance = greater transformation. If there is no resistance you are not evolving and you’re not going to get new results in your business.

Resistance is GOOD for your business!

Expect resistance and don’t presume to know what it will look like. This is VERY important. Be curious about how your ego will try and stop you in your business. If you can both expect resistance and look for it you can manage it better.

Resistance is usually loudest before right action, and at the very beginning of taking action (it actually gets worse then).

The more you understand your own patterns of resistance, the more powerful you can be because resistance will stop running the show in your business.

How resistance is impacting you in your business?