How to Move Through Resistance When Setting a Big Goal

Hey friend, welcome to Erin Is Activated! My new platform that details my journey of becoming a personal trainer, being in solidarity with the movement to decolonize wellness, and helping all of us heal and achieve bodily autonomy for all. You can unsubscribe at any time.

What carried us to where we are now won’t carry us to where we want to go in the future. The full moon in Capricorn took place yesterday, which means this is a full moon ruled by Saturn. Saturn or Sky Daddy, is the planet of time, structures, long-term gratification over short-term pleasure.

What are you doing right now, today, to make moves towards your long term goals and gratification? Right now, I’m sitting in a study room willing myself to become a Certified Personal Trainer, and I have to say there’s a lot of resistance to this. I haven’t studied for something in 10+ years. For the most part when you have to get a degree or a certificate of some kind, there’s usually some material that you don’t want to study, you’re not interested in learning, or you don’t care to memorize. Unfortunately, I have to learn and memorize a bunch of stuff about human anatomy, neurons, what cells are doing, muscles and tendons, etc. that I find pretty boring.

As I’ve been coming up against this resistance I thought to myself, “Well, I’m a coach. How can I coach myself through this?” The first thing I had to tell myself was that it’s okay that I’m feeling this resistance. I acknowledged and affirmed my feelings instead of pushing them away and burying them. I told myself that it’s okay that I’m feeling resistance and in fact that’s perfectly human. Meeting this resistance is actually part of growth, of learning. Similar to when we’re working out, we often create resistance in order to grow and strengthen our muscles. If we stopped every time it got hard, we wouldn’t grow. It’s the same with our brains! If we’re trying to learn something new, grow our brains in some capacity, and introduce new information and try to retain it, we’ll probably be met with some kind of resistance at first.

I found myself feeling a little bit of shame for these feelings of resistance because I was like, “Well, what kind of personal trainer are you if you’re already feeling tired, resistant, and unmotivated to study this material? Where did your discipline go? Where did your study habits go?” I had to acknowledge these feelings of shame and this negative self-talk that came up as I was berating my natural resistance to something that was a bit daunting, hard, and scary (like studying a big ass book to take a 200 question test). I had to accept that I wasn’t going into this process engines blazing and ready to study my ass off and study shit I don’t really care about learning to be honest.

I care about being a competent personal trainer. I care about giving my future clients the best, most trauma-informed, holistic, detailed, in-depth knowledge, education, advice, and feedback. But in this moment right now, I don’t care about memorizing shit about cells and neurons. Back in college, I remember studying to become an English major and I loved writing. Writing has always come naturally for me, but were their subjects or projects or assignments that I could care less about doing? Oh fuck yeah! I wanted to be good at writing, but did I always want to study the kinds of things we had to study in school? No, not really. So, when I put this in perspective, it makes me feel a lot less guilty.

When it comes to any kind of goal you want to achieve the first step is getting intimate with your mindset, as well as your body, and how it’s feeling about you taking on this goal. What feelings are coming up and how can you validate, affirm, and acknowledge them without shame or guilt? Know that those feelings of resistance are totally valid and human.

The other thing that came up for me that gave me pause was the idea of becoming a personal trainer, envisioning myself as this person, felt scary, kind of daunting, and a little inaccessible. They say you need to visualize your future self in order to manifest this version of you and I agree with this, AND it was a little hard because I knew it was a big leap from where I am now in this current reality.

Capricorn is about foundations and structures and a full moon is about release. Plus, Uranus just moved into Gemini, and along with this Full Moon in Capricorn we’re being asked to restructure, get rid of old plans, and throw the old blueprints out in order to build a new foundation for the future we’re stepping into. We’re being invited to move towards what feels completely out of reality for us. Chani Nicholas describes Uranus in Gemini as this time of flipping the script, letting go of unhelpful stories, and releasing self-sabotaging thought-patterns. Empress Karen Rose also speaks about how

In invite you to join me in flipping the script. We’re believing in a new version of ourselves, it’s loading as I type, and saying goodbye to the old. We have to get rid of the old habits in order to embrace the new person we’re meant to grow into.