Go somewhere quiet for about 20 minutes. Pull out your Daybook and pick up a pen. Now think back to the times you tried to stick with a project after you had lost interest in it. Pretend you’re in that situation again, and recreate the experience of having to focus your attention on the task. How does that make you feel? Does the feeling get more intense the longer you continue this fantasy? What is that feeling about?

Describe it the best you can. Be sure to take your time. This will not be fun, but if you do a thorough job you won’t ever have to do it again. Continue writing until you’ve described everything you can about what you were feeling.

When you’re done, read what other Scanners have said:

Rosa: I felt like I was being locked away from everything that would make me happy. I wanted to struggle to get free.

Howard: I knew if I stayed at what I was doing, my life would be drab and boring.

Renee: It was like going down a tunnel and thinking I’d never see the sun again. That was such a bad feeling.

If you wrote something similar, you’ve named that feeling. For the sake of easy identification, let’s call it The Bad Feeling. Confronting it is very powerful stuff because that feeling drives you away from every project once you’ve lost interest. It’s what stops you from following through even when you want to. The Bad Feeling is the first half of the mystery behind what makes you a Scanner, and it’s important that next time you see it, you’ll know what it is.

The Bad Feeling is different from Resistance. When you hit Resistance, you really want to continue the project but you want to skip the next step in it, because it’s painful. Give yourself 20 minutes to write in your Daybook about how it feels when you’re done with a project before other people think the project is done. In a new comment on this page, tell us if you’re familiar with the Bad Feeling and share what it feels like for you. After you share your experience, read the rest of the comments and reply to a few, because we all need to know our feelings, good or bad, are valid and not as unusual as we thought.

Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones.

Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to Exercise 2: Name That Other Feeling after you are done adding your comments.

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