What just happened? No big deal, right? Wrong. You just lost the first battle of the day. Resistance just kicked your butt. Resistance has broken your will before you’ve even gotten out of bed. You will most likely be its slave for the rest of the day.

I have been battling resistance my whole life. As we get a little further into this book I think you will discover you have been too. What is resistance? It’s that sluggish feeling of not wanting to do something that you know is good for you, it’s the inclination to do something that you unabashedly know is not good for you, and it’s everything in between. It’s the desire and tendency to delay something you should be doing right now.

Do you ever feel like you are your own worst enemy? Have you ever thought you could accomplish great things if only you weren’t so busy with so many little things? Do you struggle to make decisions with confidence? Are you tired of setting goals and not accomplishing them? Do you procrastinate? Are you afraid to say what you really think and feel? Then this book is for you.

If you’ve ever tried to accomplish anything worthwhile, then you’ve been face-to-face with resistance. You may not have called it by that name in the past, but I suspect you will in the future. It helps to call it by its name. In every moment of every day, resistance is there, waiting to pounce.

How does resistance manifest? It wears a thousand masks, many of which are so effective we don’t even recognize resistance is behind them. Laziness, procrastination, fear, doubt, instant gratification, self-loathing, indecision, escapism, pride, self-deception, friction, tension, and self-sabotage are just some of the ways resistance manifests its ugly self in our lives and causes us to settle for so much less than God has imagined for us. You cannot become the-best-version-of-yourself unless you wake up every morning ready to slay resistance. It stands between you and the person God created you to be. Resistance stands between you and happiness.

I sit down to write, but instead I start checking my e-mail or thinking about what snacks will be required to write something great. This is resistance at work. Sure, I am an accomplished author and have written twenty books that have sold millions of copies, but just like every college student who sits down to write a paper, I will have to slay resistance in order to even get started. The thing about resistance is that it is so simple, so ordinary—and so paralyzing if we are not mindful of it.

This is why most people who start writing a book never finish it. We all know people who are writing a book. I get requests from people all the time to help them get the book they are writing published. They are very keen to speak about the publishing process right now. I always say to them, “Focus first on writing your book. When your manuscript is finished and ready for a professional editor to look at, send me a copy, and then we can talk about publishing options.” More than 95 percent of them I never hear from again. Resistance gets the better of them.

Imagine all the books that are unwritten because of resistance. I wonder if Mozart or Beethoven had an unwritten symphony, or if Picasso and Monet died with their greatest work inside them because of resistance. I wonder how many diseases have not been cured because resistance got between the scientist and the cure. I wonder how many things never got invented because inventors succumbed to resistance. How many men and women didn’t become saints because of resistance? Resistance is a slayer of dreams.

Looking back on today, where did you encounter resistance? It was there, wasn’t it? In fact, if you really sat down and analyzed your day, you would discover that many times throughout the day you were in a tussle with resistance.

We all battle resistance daily: popes and presidents; kings, queens, and the working class; the CEO and the janitor; the rich and the poor; the educated and the uneducated; the young and the old. Nobody gets to escape the battle with resistance.

The first goal of this book is simply to give resistance a name. Once you name it, you see it differently. Things that we cannot name tend to build in mystery and become dangerous. Simply naming, defining, and learning to recognize resistance in the moments of our days causes it to lose most of its power over us. It is no longer a mystery because we have named it.

When aspiring authors contact me for advice, I always ask them a series of questions about their book. One of those questions is: What is the promise of your book? They usually look at me and wonder what on earth I am talking about. But to me, every book makes a promise. A great book delivers on its promise and an average book does not. Learning to overcome resistance is one of life’s essential lessons, and the promise of this book.

The first lesson is that you never defeat resistance once and for all. It is a daily battle.

I have been resisting happiness my whole life. I see it clearly now, but I didn’t always. I caught glimpses of it here and there throughout my life, but it wasn’t until I was forty that I really recognized the patterns. What is most disturbing and humbling is that even now that I know how resistance works, how to recognize it, and how to overcome it, there are still daily instances when I allow it to win.

We tend to see these patterns in other people’s lives with much more clarity than we see them in our own. For years I have observed people resisting happiness. We have seen it in the lives of our family, friends, and colleagues. We have all seen patterns of laziness and procrastination cripple people personally and professionally. We have all seen patterns of fear and self-loathing turn beautiful, intelligent people into a shadow of their true selves. We have all sat by while people we love sabotage their chances at success and happiness over and over again. These are the patterns that we see in people’s lives, patterns that make us wonder why.

Then there are the times when we watch as someone we love, against the advice of everyone in his or her inner circle, does something monumentally stupid. We wonder to ourselves, “Why would anybody do something so stupid?” The answer is universal and disarmingly simple: People do stupid things because they mistakenly believe those stupid things will make them happy.

I know the people, things, behaviors, and experiences that make me happy. It is no surprise to anyone, I suspect, that these are the same people, things, behaviors, and experiences that help me become a-better-version-of-myself.

Working hard makes me happy. And there is no work that brings me more joy than writing. Writing makes me happy, and at the end of a good day of writing everything is better in my world. Still, every time I sit down to write, before I can even get a word down, I have to battle and slay resistance.

A morning walk makes me happy. It clears my mind, fires up my metabolism, and gets the endorphins moving through my body. There is no comparison between a day with a morning walk and one without it. And yet, resistance fills my mind with a hundred excuses at that moment of decision each and every morning.

Sitting down for a few minutes of prayer and reflection at the beginning of the day makes me happy. It gives me the clarity, focus, perspective, and gratitude I need to make the most of the day. But almost every day I am tempted to put it off until later or skip it altogether. Why? The allure of action, the temptation to believe that going somewhere or doing something is urgent. This is one of my first struggles with resistance each day, and resistance knows that this is the most significant battle of the day. If resistance can keep me from praying, it will win many more battles throughout the day.

There are a dozen other examples, but starting my day with prayer, taking a walk, and jumping straight into my work is a bulletproof recipe for me to exponentially increase my chances of having a fabulous day.

Most people think they are reasonably happy, and most people yearn to be happier. So, let’s do something about that. Let’s increase your happiness score. I am certain that what I am about to share with you in these pages is going to flood your life with happiness, and so much more.

It’s time to stop resisting happiness. It’s time to stop destroying our own happiness. We do it in so many ways. Do you worry about things you have no control over? Worry destroys happiness. Do you compare yourself with others in an unhealthy way? Comparison is a destroyer of happiness. Do you cling to bad relationships? Bad relationships destroy our happiness. Do you have a lot of self-doubt, or even self-loathing? They are destroyers of happiness. Do you buy things you can’t afford and don’t need? Debt is a destroyer of happiness and a creator of stress. Gossip, laziness, fear, excuses, negative thinking, ingratitude, and jealousy are all destroyers of happiness.

You are on a quest for happiness. Working out what makes you happy is essential, but so is working out what destroys your happiness. In order to do this, let’s explore why we all have such an ongoing desire for happiness.

When we are children, we think to ourselves, “Oh, if only I could have that toy, I would be happy.” But then we get that toy and after a while we realize that a toy is not going to satisfy our desire for happiness. So we turn our attention toward something else, perhaps a bike. We tell ourselves, “If I ever get that bike, I will be happy.” We get the bike and of course the yearning for happiness is still not satisfied.

As we get a little older and social interactions become more important we tend to attach our hope for happiness to friendship. Now we think to ourselves, “If she became my best friend, I would be happy forever.” But our desire for happiness cannot be fulfilled in this way either. No one person can satisfy our immense desire for happiness. And it is not fair to attach that hope to any one person. So many relationships have died under the weight of this misplaced expectation.

In our adolescent years we tend to turn our attention toward pleasure. We tell ourselves, “If I have this pleasure or that pleasure, or all the pleasures at the same time, then I will be happy.” But pleasure is a poor substitute for the happiness we desire. It is fleeting and we yearn for something that is lasting.

Our attention in early adulthood turns toward accomplishment. We think to ourselves, “I know the answer now. If I can accomplish something great, I will stop feeling empty and dissatisfied, and I will be happy forever.” Maybe we do and maybe we don’t accomplish something great, but regardless, the yearning for a happiness that is higher or deeper continues.

At this point most people just cycle back through all the same things, thinking that more of something or more of everything is the answer to their insatiable desire for happiness. So they chase more things, more money, more pleasure, more of the “right” friends, and more accomplishments. But they end up dissatisfied and wondering what on earth will satisfy this incredible desire for happiness. The answer is nothing.

We often make the mistake of hoping that certain people or things will fill the hole, but sooner or later most of us come to realize that only God can fill that hole that represents all our deepest longings. The hole is bigger than anything this life has to offer, but allowing God to fill it will make everything this life has to offer better.

We yearn for happiness because we are created for happiness. “The desire for God is written in the human heart because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for (CCC, 27).” This is the opening point of the first chapter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

About a week before Easter this year I overheard a conversation between my eldest son, Walter, who is six years old, and my daughter, Isabel, who is four.

“You are too wrapped up in Jesus, Isabel!”

“Well, Easter is all about Jesus, so it’s good to be wrapped up in him,” Isabel replied.

“I like Jesus, but I am more interested in the chocolate eggs and the chocolate bunnies.”

Wow! There it is. Too often we are more interested in something other than Jesus, something other than the happiness that God wants to freely give us.

Who or what is at the center of your life?

If you want to make sense of everything, place God at the center of your life. Have you ever really tried it? What do you have to lose?

What’s fascinating to me is that even though the quest for happiness is one of the defining themes of every person’s life, God wants us to be happy even more than we want to be happy ourselves.

My consulting company has a large coaching practice. We have life coaches to help people develop a strategic plan for their lives. We have business coaches to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. And we have executive coaches to help corporate leaders gain perspective on the biggest challenges facing their businesses and organizations. It’s amazing how life changing this type of coaching can be. Do some get more out of it than others? Yes. Why? Some people are more committed and engaged in the process.

Whenever I speak to the coaches, I warn them about one scenario. “You are going to be tempted to judge yourself as a coach by how well your participants perform. That’s a mistake and it leads to a bad place. Your participants’ successes and failures are their own. You cannot take credit for their successes, and you cannot take the blame for their failures. Your job is to coach them well by faithfully following the coaching program. Otherwise you will end up crossing a line that a coach should never cross. You will find yourself in a place where you want it for them more than they want it for themselves. Then you will make your first mistake. You will do something for them that they should be doing for themselves. You will think you are helping them, but it is a lie and you know it. Your job is to empower those you coach; when you do for them what they should be doing for themselves, you create entitlement and dependency rather than empowerment. It is incredibly frustrating when you see amazing possibilities for the people you are coaching, and you want it more for them than they want it for themselves. Don’t give in to that frustration!”

God wants heaven for you even more than you want it for yourself.

When we resist happiness, we resist God and the-very-best-version-of-ourselves. To resist God is to resist our very truest selves. When we resist happiness we place a barrier between ourselves and God, a barrier between ourselves and the incredible people God created us to be, a barrier between ourselves and the wonderful life God dreamed for us before we were in our mothers’ wombs.

It’s time to stop resisting happiness. It’s time to slay resistance.

I do know this: In those early years, I had no idea that life was so messy. In some ways I suppose that was a good thing, because if I had known how difficult, heartbreaking, and messy this path would be, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to set out in the beginning. Perhaps that is why God only reveals our journey to us one step at a time.

In others ways, my naïveté about the messiness of life limited my ability to reach people during those early years. In order to speak deep into people’s lives, you have to have a sense of their heartache, of what keeps them awake at night. I was too young and too inexperienced to know much about these things.

A huge part of coming alongside people and helping them discover who they are and what they are here for is mercy. And a big part of mercy is simply being with people in their pain and suffering, holding them physically or spiritually, even if there is nothing else you can do for them. But when I first set out I was too spiritually immature to know this.

Many years later, when I was first diagnosed with cancer, I remember walking out of the doctor’s office. It was a bright, sunny day, and the light was blinding. I was in a daze. Things were spinning. I had to sit in my car and steady myself for a couple of minutes before driving home. But the thing that struck me the most was that everyone around was going about their day. They had no idea what was happening inside me. That experience changed me forever. It changed the way I relate with family and friends. It changed the way I lead and manage people. It changed the way I speak and write.