Use This Mindset Shift to Eliminate Resistance and Create Generous Art

Recognize wound-driven behavior & become the prolific creator you were meant to be

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield encourages readers to see resistance as an enemy. It’s a dark force that undermines creative efforts. It encourages focus on an outcome at the expense of a process.

While writer’s block is an impenetrable wall, resistance is a pest. Annoying, yes, but it’s something we can negotiate with. Interestingly, Pressfield implies that resistance is inherent to the creative process.

I disagree. It isn’t that resistance tags along with all creative efforts. Rather, most people use creative work, whether they know it or not, to resolve an early wound. Resistance is the shape that wound takes.

Your creative impulse isn’t rooted in love, purpose, or passion alone. It’s about resolution. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, this is liberating news. It’s an invitation to relax and take yourself and your work much less seriously.

With this understanding, you become relaxed. Flexible. The zest that inspired your commitment to being a creator becomes more accessible.

Resistance is a shield

“All medicine wants is pain to cure.” Yoga of Eating

According to an ancient typology system called the Enneagram, human personality is a patterned defense mechanism. It arose in response to an early wound that defined early childhood. We all learned to address our early struggles by adopting an architecture of responses and interpretations. This pattern crystalized into what you experience as your personality.

These patterns are both good and bad, often at the same time. This is why it’s so hard to move beyond or even recognize the personality at work. Often, the patterns that win us approval are the same patterns that ensnare us in loops.

When you create, you’re making the world better. You’re building a body of work. You’re enriching your reader’s perceptions, inviting them to see the world differently. Yet, you’re also working to disprove the person who called you ignorant and misguided. You’re contending with the opinionated dad-of-a-friend who rolled his eyes when you told him you were a writer.

As rewarding as creation and all forms of personal growth can be, they’re also elaborate forms of defense. Resistance beckons when you worry that your defensive strategy might fail this time. It’s evidence that you’re using a process to move beyond an ancient wound.

Values drive motivation; pain is a treadmill

“Every victory is a funeral. When you win a war, you celebrate by mourning.” Tao Te Ching

In response to frequent resistance, people talk about developing discipline or building habits. Productivity gurus tell us that humans were born to stray from challenge. If what you want isn’t related to reproduction or eating, they say, good luck. It’s going to take massive helpings of will.

Do you relate to feeling tense and even a little dreadful before writing? You feel accomplished when holding your book in your hands. But you’re tight, uneasy or bored while creating. You’re not sure it’s going to work this time.

Immediate gratification is easier because there’s little chance it will fail us. But successful creation is a bandage. Writing a successful song or article patches our wounds. But resistance reflects the question, will this once-loyal defensive strategy now disappoint?

When you ignore the link between creativity and pain, you fall into painful dynamics. You become machine-like. You pump out content in an unconscious way, focused on rewards alone. This drives burnout. You’re creating to prove something.

Not realizing the pain that drives mindless creative output, you become hard on yourself. Detrimentally so. You become a pressure cooker. You’re focused on validation. Being right. Changing minds. Helping people. Being of service.

Your drive to be helpful or right is the voice of the disoriented and wounded child within you. If you always respond to her through overwork, multiple pots of coffee per day, you’ll stunt her growth. Your creative process will be about managing pain, rather than inspiring real change. But you won’t know it.

This is why most people lose motivation, by the way. They get caught in ancient strategies that served them in the past. They take their exhaustion or boredom as a sign that they’re not working hard enough. In the process, they lose sight of the unconscious values that inspired their initial drive. They see nothing but extrinsic rewards. Their work loses its juice.

Curiosity is a better ship captain

“The world is going to hell and the only way it might not is if we cease from doing anything to try and stop it.” Alan Watts

There’s nothing wrong with creating to resolve a wound per se. It’s the lack of consciousness that creates trouble. When you use discipline and force to drive your creativity, you risk amplifying the basic wound that rendered you in need of those programs to begin with.

Noting the wounds that drive your behavior, you free yourself. You develop a greater appreciation for those hobbies that arise out of joy alone.

For instance, you write because you like it, sure, but you know it brings the possibility of other rewards. It’s your attachment to those rewards that encourages friction. When you get caught in being helpful or making money, the act becomes pressurized. It’s not fun anymore. The wound takes over.

But you play piano because it’s fun. You’d do it if no one ever heard you. Because of this, there’s an ease and lightness in your playing. You rarely make mistakes, and if you do, no one cares, including you. It takes no heroic efforts of will to get you to practice.

You can infuse these energies into what you do for joy AND tertiary rewards. Do it by thinking of your feelings on a spectrum. Play with mindsets and frameworks that bring you closer to feelings of purpose, play, and fun. This could mean establishing a system for your writing process. A system consists of where you write, when you write, how you keep yourself motivated, and so on.

When you calibrate the right system, the process will feel enjoyable and easy. If you’re creating and begin to feel neurotic or overwhelmed, take it as a sign that there’s something wrong with your system, not with you. Often a better approach will naturally arise when you take a break and do something else. Make it something that reliably feels good, like studying hypnosis or taking a walk.

Well-being should be your starting point. Not the end goal. This is how you graduate from the impulse to use creative work to resolve wounds. When you use your work as a vehicle to become successful, the work suffers. Your best creative work arrives when you’re already feeling successful.

Recognizing wound-driven behavior awards you with a sense of neutrality. If you’re unconsciously driven by pain you’re trying to correct, you get obsessive about outcomes. You become too wrapped in what your success or lack of it says about you. On the days when you struggle to write, you let it put you in a bad mood. You feel like an insufficient person.

But if you realize that your need to write every day is part of a program meant to protect you, you can take a step back. Feelings of frustration or disappointment come from your child self. If you feel at peace with your successful and your unsuccessful days, you access your sovereign, adult consciousness. This is the version of you that isn’t striving to resolve pain. It doesn’t operate from the perspective of you against the world or you against yourself. It allows things to simply be.

With more play comes more power

“When the work is done, it is forgotten. That is why it lasts forever.” Tao Te Ching

Creative work often involves wound-driven attachment, but it didn’t begin that way. Resistance arises when fear of failure outpaces a basic love for a process.

When your self-acceptance doesn’t depend on success, you become playful. You access the light-hearted curiosity that first inspired your commitment to making art.

In your openness, you produce work that is more impactful and more congruent.

Most people can’t help but see themselves as the center of reality. Remember that the earth and the people on it existed long before you. It will carry on long after you’re gone. Relax into your insignificance. This isn’t depressing; it’s a relief.

Sure, it would be more interesting to exist within the version of reality where you achieve massive levels of success. But the fact that you’re here at all is a massive opportunity. You’re free to have an enjoyable and meaningful life no matter what you achieve. But only when you’re open to it.

Release that tight grip on outcomes. This kind of detachment eases resistance, friction, and fear of failure. You’re being invited to create in peace.