Are we ever really stuck?
As a serial creator of projects I've noticed that there's a pattern to when I feel stuck and when I'm in the flow, and that there's an easy solution to the stuckness once I've noticed it.
Our brilliant, super-sharp, well-honed analytical brain loves to look forward to fill in the gaps of our imagined goal or future and pick out potential pot-holes and issues, attempting to solve them before we even encounter them. It's a defence mechanism for us, protecting us from potential danger and this mechanism is handy sometimes.
Knowing what issues we might face means we can be prepared, forewarned is fore-armed they say.
Photo courtesy of Hanan Hashi on unsplash
However, as we invest more and more time trying to predict a future that hasn't yet happened, it tends to look bigger, more solid and potentially harder to handle. The result of all this thought investment can be that we do nothing. We believe we need to think some more or we leave it on our to-do list to languish for eternity. Oh, and we beat ourselves up about not acting!
The problem is, our brains can only anticipate what it already knows, or thinks it knows. The future is an imperfect equation - our intellect cannot account for wisdom in the moment, the availability of insight or the fact that what happens is rarely what we think will happen.
The reality is very different, in any given moment we have everything we need to navigate a situation, including the gift of a new thought; which helps us see the situation differently, make a connection we hadn't yet seen or realise who can help us and so on. By overthinking the problem we are actually limiting our ability to do those things. Filling our natural 'bandwidth' with the static of our rumination.
Photo courtesy Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
When we take a step back from the thinking, and all of our stories about what's happening, there is a simple fact.
Either we know what to do next or we don't.
And the good news is that we are in possession of the greatest learning machine that exists.
The human mind.
So if we know what the next step is we can do it. And then see what unfolds.
And if we don't, and we accept that we don't, we start learning. We realise who to call (Ghostbusters, obviously!), what words to put into Google, or remember that getting started and messing up is all part of the process.
Knowing this has helped me see that whenever I have a project or problem that looms on my to do list as feeling heavy and unwieldy the issue itself is rarely the problem, it's that I'm caught up in step 17. It’s my thinking that’s the problem, it’s my thinking I’m struggling with now - not the actual problem.
The answer invariably is to step away from the noise and either take the action that deep down I know I need to do, or accept that I really don't know and start learning.
We are never really stuck. We just think we are.