341. How to Bypass Resistance

How to Bypass Resistance By Steve Pavlina You may have heard this quote from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Here’s a variation on this idea that we can use for personal growth transitions: All growth passes through three stages. First, you’ll be ridiculed. Second, your efforts will meet with serious opposition. Third, you’ll be accepted as the new person you’ve become. Have you seen this pattern show up in your life? I’ve run through it many times. Lots of readers have run this pattern. It happens with career transitions, relationships transitions, lifestyle changes, health improvements, and more. Schopenhauer was a pessimist. In fact, his worldview is called philosophical pessimism. If we apply Schopenhauer’s model to personal growth, aren’t we being a little pessimistic then? Pessimism isn’t truth. Pessimism is just one of many lenses we can use, and if we go into a growth experience with a pessimistic lens, aren’t we more likely to create a journey that looks like Schopenhauer’s stages? Are these three stages really necessary? Is the ridicule necessary? Is the violent opposition necessary? Do we really have to go through those first two stages to get to the third stage? Can’t we just skip to the end? … Blogging about my personal growth journey since 2004 has given me a lot of feedback. For many years I basically ran Schopenhauer’s script. It was there from day one. What! You’re quitting the computer gaming industry? What the heck is blogging? You’ll never make any money doing that! After many years of such transitions, the script became all too predictable, and because of its predictability, I got faster at running it. Instead of taking weeks or months to play out, I’d be at stage three within days. Eventually I’d get there within 1-2 days. The criticism and resistance would blow up and then burn out within 24-48 hours. It was Schopenhauer’s script running on Internet time. … That led to me to ask: What if I stopped expecting resistance in areas where I’d previously expected it? Would the criticism still happen? And that spawned more questions: Were people criticizing me because they objectively didn’t like my ideas? Or were they criticizing me because I was broadcasting incongruence, defensiveness, or the expectation of criticism? So I began to experiment.