Human Hour: The Nudge You Need
Even a hero needs a nudge to do something new
“You can’t fail now, because the only failure would have been not to leap.”
I found myself writing that to Nancy after she shared during our January Human Hour call that she’d just quit a toxic job she’d been wanting to leave for years. She didn’t know exactly what was coming next, but she said “movement is the way out of stuckness,” and she had to leap before she could discover where she might land.
In honor of Nancy and those who upvoted the topic during our last call, our next Human Hour call on Friday, February 16 at 1pm CST will be focused on answering this set of questions:
How can I open my heart to new or challenging experiences? How can I cultivate willingness to try things I want to do but am afraid of, or to enter challenging situations I typically shy away from? And maybe even, how can I cross that chasm from a bread-winning job to doing what really interests me?
Essentially, the question is, how do I go on the hero’s journey?
The hero’s journey is a fundamental pattern of growth and meaning that underpins all human experience. First articulated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it posits that a good story always begins in the “ordinary world” with the hero receiving a call to an adventure they at first refuse. They resist “crossing the threshold” into a new, extraordinary world. Eventually, though, a mentor comes along and nudges them over that threshold. Think Obi Wan Kenobi encouraging Luke to leave Tatooine in the original Star Wars.
If you find yourself frozen on a threshold in your life, this month’s Human Hour might be just the Obi Wan Kenobi you’ve been waiting for.
I know one of the topics we’ll dig into is the crucial difference between fear and Resistance. At first blush, they look very similar. Fear is the desire to escape or eliminate something that is existentially dangerous. For instance, when someone pushes you toward the edge of the Grand Canyon, you’ll feel fear. It’s a natural and healthy protective instinct. On the other hand, when someone pushes you to write the book you’ve been wanting to write, you’ll experience something that feels almost identical in the body. It’s called Resistance, and because its effect on the nervous system is so similar to fear, we often get them confused. Here’s the big difference:
Fear is characterized only by opposition to an experience, whereas Resistance is characterized by both opposition to and attraction to an experience.
For example, you know the Grand Canyon thing is fear because you’re not drawn to it too. You don’t think, “Wow, I’d really love to fall off this cliff, but what if I don’t know how to fall, or what if I can’t figure out how to fall all the way to the bottom, or what if I fall all the way to the bottom but some people don’t like how I land, or even worse, what if I fall all the way to the bottom and no one notices? Yeah, I’d really like to plummet to my death, but let’s hold off for today and scroll social media instead.”
When you feel deeply drawn to something and you deeply dread it, you’re experiencing Resistance.
The term Resistance was coined by author Steven Pressfield. He says, “The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” For a fantastic primer on Resistance, you can visit Kirsten Powers’s “The Invisible Force Blocking Your Creativity.” But before you do, be sure to register below for this month’s Human Hour call and dig deep with us into this simple formula:
What you're most drawn to do, but most dreading doing, is your best direction.
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