Good morning.
This is my first talk on Insight Timer and hopefully the beginnings of what at the end of the road will be a podcast on YouTube or who knows where.
I wanted to talk today about resistance and resistance really around what stops us from being the person we know deep down we are or we can feel we could and should be.
I do a lot of my thinking when I'm out for a walk early in the morning,
Put a rucksack with 20 kilos on and just walk.
I'll listen to a podcast or I will record a voice note for me just thinking out loud.
And I did that yesterday.
And I'd gotten to a point where for a very long time now I've been thinking about starting on this journey and I haven't.
And a mentor of mine in this space basically just said,
Take out your phone or turn on Zoom,
Hit record,
Say what you've got to say,
Press stop,
Download it,
And then upload it onto YouTube or whatever the case may be.
And I don't know about some of you,
But as simple as that sounded,
And in many ways still sounds,
There's so much involved in that simple process.
Things that I probably wasn't and I'm likely still not fully aware about.
And in that,
I guess is what's popularly known as ego.
And ego can be described in a number of ways or understood in a number of ways.
My belief is that,
You know,
The ego is there essentially to protect you,
To keep you safe from all of the quote unquote bad things we've learnt in our past that the world has imparted and placed on us as we've grown up,
Whether that be as a child,
As a teenager,
As a young adult,
At whatever stage of our life,
We've learnt from pain.
And the ego is there to help us stop feeling that pain,
Or to help us avoid that pain.
So the question that I had for myself is,
What's the resistance to starting on this journey?
And what is it that the ego is trying to keep me safe from?
And fundamentally,
What showed up was the ego is there,
Trying to keep me small,
Small so that I wouldn't put myself out there,
Out here in a space which is open ended and never ending.
And a lot of us,
If not all of us have received a comment,
Which is judgmental,
In person,
Or you overheard someone saying it.
We've perhaps responded to something on social media and had less than positive remarks said to us about that,
Or seen that happen to somebody else,
Seen somebody completely and utterly berated or torn down.
And it's natural for that to instill fear,
Worry,
Trepidation.
You know,
Quite recently,
A good friend of mine,
Who,
As I've been grieving,
Really shown that they were a close friend of mine,
A lot closer than at the time I actually realized,
Was sadly killed recently,
In an accident.
And,
You know,
I thought a lot about what his last thoughts might possibly have been.
And of course,
I will never know.
But what it did do is make me reflect on what I wanted my last thoughts to be,
Whenever they may be.
And it was that I'd lived a full,
True and authentic life.
So I asked myself the question,
Is being small,
Living a full,
True and authentic life?
And the answer is no.
And so on that walk,
I turn on the voice note function on my phone,
And hit record,
And recorded a podcast,
Got back,
Sent it to my mentor,
Said,
Hey,
I pressed record.
And it's out there.
I'm going to upload it.
And I listened to it.
And it was rubbish.
Not as in the content,
But just those background noise,
There was cars driving past there was wind blowing,
You know,
People walking past and me saying hello to them or bicycle ringing a bell.
It was just a lot of distraction.
So I deleted the message to him.
But then I actually had a coaching session with him later on that evening.
And I said,
I told him what happened.
And we both chuckled about it.
Regardless of what that first podcast was like,
I still have the original copy,
And it'll still always in my mind be the first podcast.
This is essentially the second one.
And you know,
Using a mic and hopefully a cleaner and clearer environment.
But the main thing was,
I got out of my own way.
And that's the thing is that all too often,
With all completely realistically,
The main thing that stops us from living a full,
True and authentic life is ourselves.
We have a part of ourselves,
Which one can label as the ego,
Which wants to protect us from whatever.
For me,
In this case,
It's being small.
And being small isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Being small in this context is really about not stretching out and expanding and saying this is truly me and seeing what comes from that.
And I'm really excited to see what comes from this.
So my parting point to you today is take some time to stop and reflect and focus in on an element of resistance that you have in your life towards something or someone and ask yourself that simple question.
What is the resistance around this thing and see what comes up.
All the best.
Thank you.
