When resistance doesn't look like fear
I’m a professional content designer — a lead for one of the world’s biggest tech consultancies.
I help organisations communicate clearly with millions of users. And I thought that would make starting a YouTube channel easy.
Nope.
If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start soon — once you’re ready, confident, equipped or organised — I think I can help.
Resistance doesn’t always feel like fear
What stopped me wasn’t panic or self-doubt in any obvious sense. It was something far sneakier. I didn’t feel blocked. I felt energised. I was planning, researching, buying equipment, setting things up properly. It all felt productive.
But it was still resistance, in a different hat.
I've encountered resistance before, and it usually looks like procrastination for me. Letting days pass without getting out of my pyjamas. Binge-watching Mad Men again. Or, a new time-waster, creating 86 versions of the same AI ballad in Suno, certain the next one will be a hit.
But I didn't feel like I was wasting time over YouTube. I thought I was getting it right and doing the groundwork.
Yet... I still wasn’t posting. By the time I admitted something was wrong, I had:
17 scripts that I'd started and never finished
a fully redecorated bedroom turned into a YouTube studio
professional cameras, lighting, microphones and tech gear to rival a proper video content creator
zero posts on YouTube
I started to realise I wasn’t preparing, I was stalling. I was pretending to be an online content creator in my head, while failing to do the ONE THING that makes that a reality... actually upload something other people can watch.
I was play-acting at being an online content creator. My dress-up box was an expensive one, but it was all just toys to make my fantasy seem more real.
When preparation becomes avoidance
Each step I was taking felt sensible to me. It felt necessary. But underneath it all was one simple thing: I was scared of being seen. I was petrified of undermining my professional identity or of getting it wrong in public.
Ironically, in the role I'm actually paid to do 5 days a week, getting things wrong is the job. Iteration is how good content is created – and to iterate, you need something that's not fully working, so you can make it better.
Yet somehow, I decided different rules applied when I didn't have a giant corporate machine behind me. I failed to see that what being employed gives me is permission. When there was no one around to tell me when to work, what to work on, or that I was doing a good job... I felt lost.
The shift
The realisation that turned this all around wasn’t dramatic, but it was uncomfortable. I started to see I was iterating my fears.
Every time I solved one problem, another would pop up. I noticed that this pull to keep planning never got satisfied. There was expectation, but no release. No resolution. There was just the changing shape of what scared me.
Now, spending on equipment when you're starting a business is justifiable. You need certain equipment to look legitimate, I get that. And I told myself that maybe this would turn into a business one day, if I was lucky. But the truth is, legitimacy doesn't come from shiny tech. It comes from showing up, day after day, and being valuable.
I finally realised this: I'm not moving.
How do you know when you're moving when you're on a train? The landscape changes. Your view changes. You move closer to one destination while moving further away from another. That's obvious when we're talking about trains. But it's much less clear when it's our emotional or mental state that we're talking about.
But when 6 months passed since I'd bought my first piece of video equipment, and it was still unused, I had to admit this wasn't momentum. I was doing stuff – decorating, buying furniture, that's all 'stuff', but I wasn't addressing the underlying feeling that I just wasn't good enough to film anything. I wasn’t moving anywhere. I was $7,000 deeper, in exactly the same place.
The 5 questions that changed everything
I asked myself many questions over the few weeks of working this out in my head. But these are the 5 that helped me the most. I hope they help you too.
1. Does how I’m acting align with who I am?
I want to help people – to take all my professional knowledge and create value that will inspire people to move closer to their goals. That was, and is, my overriding desire.
To help people, I have to actually talk to them. So just dreaming about creating helpful content, while never creating a thing, didn’t align with that.
2. What’s the worst that could happen?
I ask myself this question all the time at work. My job is literally to anticipate problems with content and solve them before they arise. So I'm often thinking about worst case scenarios.
The truth? No one dies if a YouTube video is bad. At worst, I might look like an idiot or waste a bit of someone’s time, which is the risk built into doing absolutely anything at all.
Still, if that happens, no one dies. The 'real world' outcomes are tiny, compared with the good I might do if I'm brave.
3. What does failure actually look like?
Pinning this down was a turning point.
When my goal was 'don’t look stupid', not posting was guaranteed success. Don't post, can't look like a fool, right?
But when I flipped it around in my head, and refocused my goal on 'help someone', not posting became total failure. 100% failure. Now the thought of that really scared and disappointed me.
4. Would I rather be dead?
This sounds brutal, but it was a good question for me because I've lost both my parents within the last 2 years.
When you watch someone die, it makes it hyper real that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Waiting forever is not a 'neutral' state. It has real consequences. We don't have forever. We have right now. You have to make it count or it'll be gone. So would I rather be dead? Because if I wait long enough, I will be.
5. Is my list of requirements expanding?
Getting ready feels warm and anticipatory, like gearing up for a party you really can't wait to attend. But imagine the same party, except this time you don't want to go. You're getting ready but you still hope something will happen to get you out of it.
That's the difference between moving towards a happy goal, and being stuck in the station on a train that's not leaving the platform. You know this difference. You can feel it in your body.
Love it, even if it's not perfect
So if you’re waiting for the right time, the right gear, the right confidence, consider this a cosmic nudge.
Yes, it'll be imperfect, because everything is. You'll get better. And that's what inspires people more than anything else.
So press record. Then go and make a cup of tea. You've bloody well earned it.