The Frictionless Mindset
The task was never the problem
Every question on this page has the same answer underneath it. Resistance is the negative thoughts and feelings you have added to the task. You can see them in the words you use about it. Taking those additions back off is called unframing.
These are the questions people ask when something will not start, and the task itself turns out to be perfectly ordinary. Each one is answered directly, on its own page.
The questions
- Why do I make tasks bigger than they are? The task did not grow. Something was added to your description of it.
- Why does thinking about a task feel worse than doing it? The expectations you are holding are not the task. What you are actually meeting when you think about it.
- Why do some tasks feel harder than they are? Nothing in the task is difficult and doing it still takes something out of you. What is running alongside the work.
- Why am I avoiding a simple task? You already know the task is simple, and knowing it did not help. The three things people tell themselves.
- Why do I keep getting off track with my goals? Assuming the goal is still one of your priorities, the resistance sits in one of two places.
The one thing underneath them
Resistance is the layer of negative thoughts, feelings, judgments, beliefs, and opinions overlaid onto a task. It is the story you are telling yourself about the task. It becomes visible, and workable when that layer is described.
Five different questions, one answer. That is not a trick of phrasing. The questions differ in when you notice the trouble, which is why each page answers its own, but what you are meeting in every case is the layer rather than the task.
It is something you have, not something you are. And it does not require an expedition into your past. The layer neutralizes whether or not you ever learn where it came from.
See the additions for yourself
The layer has one weakness. It cannot survive an accurate description. The facts of a task carry no dread. Only the additions do.
The Neutrality Check is free and takes about a minute. Paste in the sentence you use about the task you are not doing, and it sorts that sentence into facts and judgments, so you can see precisely which words are the task and which words are the layer.
I write about resistance and its neutralization every week at Work Without Working.
Get the newsletter