When To Push Through Resistance

We’re all going to face adversity and difficulty. Our path to having the health, career, personal life and relationships we desire is not perfectly smooth. We are often confronted with challenges that make our life and progress harder than we expected it to be.

It can be really tricky knowing how to navigate it. On one hand, there’s the growth-minded philosophy that “obstacles make us stronger”. We trust that the challenges are there to serve us in our personal evolution. But on the other hand, there’s an equally valid argument that resistance might be an indicator for us to try a different way.

So when do we know when to push through and when to change course?

Of course it’s entirely contextual, but there’s a larger framework to consider that connects to the two forms of stress. There’s ‘distress’, which is more harmful and does not contribute to our overall wellness, and then there’s ‘eustress’ which is the minor agitation of doing things outside of our comfort zone.

Resistance takes these two forms as well. One is helpful and one is not. Our approach should be to embrace the resistance that causes us to step up and grow, and not invest too much in resistance that is obtrusive to our goals.

So when you’re facing off with resistance, here’s a series of questions you can ask to figure out how to proceed:

1. Is there an easier or different way?

When you’re prompted to think through a present challenge, give yourself the perspective of the various ways to approach overcoming it. We often neglect to even know what our options are.

2. Is this resistance necessary?

There’s a psychological term called “learned helplessness” that causes us to tolerate something we don’t want because we’ve accepted a state of hopelessness. This puts your current path into question.

3. Does doing it this way maximize my character development?

Everything we do evolves our character in one way or another. There’s value in going through unnecessary hardship. But that’s why this question is powerful - If there’s a specific weakness that has been holding you back, then that’s the maximum opportunity and the resistance is serving you in addressing it.

Ultimately there’s no right answer. It’s intuitive. But when you ask better questions you can have better insight into the nature of the resistance and how it’s impacting you, so that you can shape your perspective accordingly.