Why We Resist: Breaking Through the Barriers That Keep Us Stuck

🎙️ Episode Title: Why We Resist: Breaking Through the Barriers That Keep Us Stuck

In this solo episode of Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, James gets real about something most of us face but rarely talk about—resistance.

Whether it’s starting a new project, recording a podcast, or following through on a goal you care about, resistance has a way of creeping in. It can feel like procrastination, self-doubt, perfectionism, or just a lack of energy—and it stops us from doing the things we know we’re meant to do.

James shares his personal struggle with solo podcasting, revealing how fear, imposter syndrome, and the need to “get it right” almost kept him silent. But he also breaks down what he’s learning about pushing through, showing up anyway, and doing the work imperfectly.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why resistance is a universal part of the creative process
• How childhood experiences and limiting beliefs fuel self-doubt
• Why waiting for the perfect moment keeps you stuck
• Simple strategies to break down big goals and actually take action
• The power of changing your environment to spark momentum
• How to reconnect with joy and remove pressure so you can move forward

This is a raw, honest, and encouraging episode for anyone who feels stuck or overwhelmed. If you're holding back on a dream, this might be exactly what you need to hear.

🎧 Listen in, take what lands, and start showing up for yourself—even if it’s just one small step at a time.

Transcript

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In this solo episode, I talk about resistance and how quite often it stop people in tracks from achieving dreams and goals. I talk about how resistance is universal and everybody goes through it, and I finish off by looking at ways that we can overcome this resistance and how you can do it today. Welcome to Man: A Quest to Find Meaning, where we help men navigate modern life, find their true purpose, and redefine manhood. I'm your host, James, and each week, inspiring guests share their journeys of overcoming fear Embracing vulnerability and finding success. From experts to everyday heroes. Get practical advice and powerful insights. Struggling with career, relationships or personal growth? We've got you covered. Join us on Man Quest to Find Meaning. Now, let's dive in. Have you ever felt an urge to start something but could never get started? Or maybe you had a project and you'd been doing it for six months to a year, but you still had resistance doing certain things. This is what I wanna talk about that resistance to doing certain things. So I'll just put it into context quickly. I've been running my podcast for almost a year. I. But I find a lot of resistance around recording episodes on my own. So if you look at my episodes, you can probably see, I think it's probably about 85% of the episodes are due with guests. And I find interviewing guests easy because the people who are on the other end have to do most of the work really. I do the work beforehand, but when it comes to the actual podcast episode, it's the of a person who's generally speaking. So I find it really hard, especially doing my own episodes, because it's all down to me giving you the content. And so I've been resisting this for a long, long time, and. So this is something that I really wanna talk about because it's something that's going on for me, and it's probably something that goes on for a lot and a lot of people. And it's that resistance to doing certain tasks or to doing certain projects or even following up and things that you know is right. There are a number of things which stop us with regards to starting projects and the idea of feeling this resistance or these blocks. And the first thing is it could be down to our own personal beliefs. Something might have happened in childhood. Maybe we started a project, maybe we started a painting. And somebody came up to us, whether it's a child or a teacher, and told us, that's rubbish. That is absolutely crap. And we took it to heart. And so we saw ourselves that we can't, we can't create art. It could be that we don't feel good enough to do this project and you feel unworthy. Or it could be down to imposter syndrome. Maybe we don't have the right skill sets currently, or we feel that who are we? Who are we to do this project, to do this thing? Who are we? And now we keep thinking to ourselves that we can't do this. This thing that we could be doing could be an absolutely huge, huge challenge. And so maybe we don't break it down big enough. We don't break it down into small enough chunks, and so the actual steps that we give ourselves are just too big for us to realize what to do next. And so we stop. Rather than breaking it down further, we stop and don't do anything at all. Or maybe it's just so really, really hard and we don't have the energy and time to do it. And then there's maybe somebody came across to us and people might have told us that you can't do that. Who are you to do that? That person may, may have tried to do it themselves and they couldn't do it, and they believe that if they can't do it, nobody can do it. And so they tell us that, how? How do you do that? You can't do that. And so we believe them. But the funny thing is if we put our mind, our persistence into it. We can do anything we want. We have the power to do anything that you want, but it all comes down to doing, to starting and taking the smaller steps. So in regards to myself recording these episodes. The feelings that came up for me were, who's going to listen to me, who's going to listen to just my voice? I'm not good enough. I'm not, I'm nobody. I can't do this. What I've come to realize is the only way that you get better at. Recording episodes or doing whatever you wanna do, whatever, whatever project you are working on is by starting and doing it again and again, and again and again. And yes, the first few times it might be crap, I'll let you into a little secret. That recently that I've been doing, so on the, on the past episodes, I've actually used AI a lot with regards to my script and reading it out. Now I've come to realize that, that using AI is great. It's a tool. It's ideal for setting things up, for do it, for doing certain tasks and for helping you to make things quicker, but. I shouldn't use it as my voice, or I shouldn't use it as a way to write scripts that I could read the script because that's not me. And so with these episodes now, I might use AI a little bit just to help me to structure a episode, but I want the voice, the voice, and the content to come from me personally. To talk about what I've been through with the idea of it maybe that other people out there are going through the same thing, and this may help So let's talk about how do we get started or how do we work through this resistance? The first thing is we have to have the boldness and the courage to start regardless of whether we're ready or not. Quite often, we will wait till the perfect moment to start, but there is never a pivot moment, so we never start. So it's about understanding that I might not be ready, but I'm gonna do it anywhere. With regards to this podcast episode, rather than waiting for the perfect moment to have the perfect script, the perfect video, the perfect voice, the perfect moment, I've just gone and done it. This has meant that I have just focused on doing an audio rather than doing an audio and a video. Here's a question for you, the listener. What are you putting on hold because you are waiting for that right moment, that right thing to happen, the right amount of money to come into your account, the right person to turn up. What are you putting on hold because you feel you don't have the right things? Another thing that I've done is I've broken down this episode into small chunks. Now, the reason I've done this is because it's very easy to get into the, into your head, especially myself, that, oh, I've gotta do the 20, 30 minutes all in one go. And it becomes, it becomes difficult because you're thinking to yourself, how am I gonna speak for 20, 30 minutes? So how I overcome that is by breaking down the chunks into smaller sections. So I might have the intro, which I start and talk about, and then I jump into. Some of the limitations, some of the things which stop us from, uh, accomplishing things. And then I might then go into how I personally overcome these things. But after each time I stop the recording, I allow myself to take a few nice deep breaths, and then I press record again. Now the editing software can do all the rest, but this can be the same for anything. It could be a book that you are starting. Maybe you are a little bit overwhelmed because you've got 10 chapters to write. So rather than focusing on completing each chapter, you could just focus on writing for 10 minutes. So you set a time throughout a day. Where you're going to write and you just write for 10 minutes. It could be, it could be a painting project that you want to go and do some painting. You could set aside time, whether that's 5, 10, 15, 20, even an hour to paint. By breaking things like this down, it makes it more achievable, and because it's more achievable, you are more likely to do it. Quite often the reason that we find things so hard to do is because we put pressure on ourselves to complete it, but we don't have much fun in doing it. So if you take the pressure out the equation and allow yourself to have more fun, it becomes effortless. And that is one big thing that I have realized myself. Another thing that you can do now. Is to create a plan. So if you have a big goal, which maybe you're getting a little bit overwhelmed, you're, you're procrastinating, you don't know how to get started, then you create a plan. Now this can be done physically. Unwritten paper, which I prefer myself. I have that much paper piled up in my office, so it's unreal. Or you can do it on a laptop. You can use apps, whichever suits you. But by creating a plan, we are taking our. Bigger goal or what we want to accomplish, and we're thinking in the end first and then working, taking steps back. So you might have a goal of doing a marathon. You obviously aren't gonna go straight and run a marathon. Well, for most people anyway, so what you might do with regards to a marathon, you might think, okay, I've gotta run 26.2 miles on this day and time. So maybe that could be in a year, a year's time, you're gonna work yourself back to where you currently are exactly in this moment. So. Say for example, you have a year, you might want to perhaps by five months be running a half a marathon distance. So let's say it's January, we want to be running a marathon in December. So by May we want to be running half marathon distance. Then perhaps by October, November, we wanna be running at at least, I think, 22 miles, because quite often the last four miles in a marathon is easier to run because you are in race mode and you've got people supporting you. So you wanna be running the minimum 22 miles by October, November to give you enough time to rest before the race. So then you might have that on a piece of paper. But alongside that, you might have a nutrition plan as well. You want to work on your nutrition. You might have an idea of, uh, mindset. So all these things come, can come into play, but we are gonna create a plan so we know exactly what we need to do and by when. This gives us good targets to aim for and. It allows us to see that, okay, we might not be hitting our targets yet. How can we start to hit our targets? What do we need to do personally to make sure that we do hit these targets? What do we, what distances do we need to alter to make sure that we hit the target, the end goal target? So again, having a plan allows us to see visually. What needs to be done. Whereas if you try to wing it, yes, sometimes that does work, but it can be hard to track and to know how you're doing. And if you know how you are doing, it can quite often give you the motivation to keep moving forward. Here's a question for you listeners out there. What things are you put in hold or haven't even started?'cause maybe they're a bit too big, and what can you do today to make it easier? Can you make a plan? Can you create a plan so that you can see exactly what you need to do and Exactly by when? Let's talk about overwhelm. A task or something might be too big for us to to complete, or maybe we just hit that point of where we need to stop and have a break. And so we hit overwhelm. And so one thing I do here if I hit overwhelm is I firstly acknowledge, I acknowledge that I'm currently feeling a little bit overwhelmed and I'm procrastinating. Now I am. I have been and sometimes are a serial procrastinator, so I understand how it feels and how frustrating and I, you know, you get this feeling of guilt, oh, I should be doing this, I should be further ahead. You, no, you might have shame. You might feel angry of yourself. Then why don't I get this, this, and this done. And there's all these different emotions which come up and that's okay. So firstly, it's about acknowledging these emotions.'cause once you, once you are able to name these emotions, quite often these emotions will disappear or in that they're in moment. You can allow yourself to feel those emotions so that these emotions don't get trapped within our body. What I do then is I allow myself to just relax. I might do this in different ways, so I might go outside for a walk. And allow myself to connect to nature. I might do some deep breathing for up to five minutes. It could be a minute, it could be five minutes, it could be whatever. I might just have a break, go and have a coffee, read a book, go and do something a little bit different, and then I come back and then I'll carry on. This way you aren't getting frustrated, you don't get overwhelmed as much, and you allow yourself to move your mind away. Another thing you can do is you can use a brain dump. So anything you have in your mind, you write on paper. So especially if you've got lots of different tasks, lots of different things going on, you can write it onto paper or even onto your laptop and you can have a physical copy of everything that's going on. And also it allows you to let go and to release and to be able to empty your mind of all the stuff that's going on. You could do is to change your environment. So this could be anything from your workplace, to your home, where you hang out with regards to your friends and socially. For me personally, when I am doing my business work or recording podcasts, I tend to do them at home, but I also know when I'm at home I am more likely to procrastinate and binge watch. TV series is, um, movies. But I know that if I go down to a pub or to a cafe and I take my laptop, I am more likely to get three or four times as much work done than I would do if I was at home. Is your environment helping you or hindering you? Is your environment helping you to achieve your goals or dreams, or is it creating more resistance? If your environment is creating you to procrastinate to create that resistance to achieving that project, what could you do to change that and to create a better working environment? Or could you move somewhere else? So that you are able to get started or to continue that project. Here I named about four or five different things that you can do when you're starting to feel resistance. And there are many, many, many, many other things. It just requires a bit of research and finding out what's right for you. To finish this episode off, let's just have a little recap of what we spoke about the last 20 minutes so that we first looked at why do we resist? So we looked at beliefs, habits, fears. We also looked at having goals, which are just too big. And then we moved into the section of different ways in which we can start to overcome resistance in our life. Things such as. Planning. So making sure that we can have this big, big goal that maybe is just too big for us to accomplish and overwhelms us and how we can plan and break this down into smaller, more achievable chunks. We talked about sometimes. And quite often we aren't ready to get started, but it's about starting anyway, starting by doing the things that we can do rather than looking at trying to be perfect and finding that perfect moment, that perfect and environment, that perfect situation. We also looked at. Our environment because our environment can have a big impact on how we run our life because. For example, you are working or doing something in your house, but your house has lots of distractions. You are more likely to get caught out, procrastinate, get overwhelmed, and so by having an environment which helps us to stay focused is key to achieving our goals, dreams, aspirations. This is something that I really struggled with in the past, and it's caused me to feel overwhelmed to procrastinate and really not get things done when I should be. Or at least I should be started. And so talking about resistance is just something that I feel people need to really look at themselves, need to discuss, need to really understand why they personally feel the resistance to certain goals, certain dreams, certain aspirations. And. This is the stepping stone with regards to how we can really step up and be seen, but not just be seen. How we can step up and allow our life to really, to expand, to become the person that we really want to become. Rather than accepting for mediocre, we're able to go and achieve our dreams and achieving our dreams, I feel is the reason that we've come here in this life. So thank you everybody for listening, and I hope. This has really, really helped you to understand why, why we have resistance, and a few little things that you could try at home to perhaps overcome that resistance. if you re listen to this episode and feel this has helped you, I would love to get some feedback. Thanks for tuning in to Man a Quest. Find meaning if today's conversation sparked something in you, take a moment to reflect, then take a step. Remember, real growth comes from action, not just insight. If you found value in this episode, share it with a friend. Leave her a review, or reach out and let me know what resonated. Your feedback helps shape the journey we are on together. For more conversations like this, make sure to subscribe and stay connected. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn for updates, tools, and upcoming guests. Remember. It's not about having the answers. It's about daring to look.