How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.
The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we're going to do?
The lizard brain.
Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.
The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
>> To read the rest of the article at SETH'S BLOG click here
In the Landmark Forum they have a great label for people who consistently give in to this kind of phenomenon (which, it's fair to say, is most people--and I certainly I've been one myself from time to time): the "95 percenters". You get 95% of the way through a project and then, right before the finish line, you stall out, you get nervous, jittery, you start to wonder if you took the right path after all, thinking, "Well, maybe I should go all the way back to the start and retrace my steps, just to be sure I made the right choices, took the right path..." Writers are particularly guilty of said phenomenon (or perhaps it just seems that way to me, from the writerly POV): I imagine I've lost count of how many times I or another writer I know has gotten to within a few pages of finishing (more often than not, a script), and then, rather than push forward and just finish the thing, we go back, edit, re-edit, fuss with the formatting, spend an afternoon trying out new titles, a new character name, think about re-inserting that one amazing but long (oh, sooo long...) subplot we cut right at the outset, and on, and on, and on...
Getting over the lizard brain can be a daunting task, but it can be done. How to do it? Hear it, LISTEN to it, know what it is, realize where it's coming from, silently nod your head in acceptance, and then move forward regardless. Sometimes the tiniest bit of blind faith in the human part of you can work wonders, when it comes to overcoming the lizard...
