Feeling Stuck? Three Moves that Might Help

Whatever it is that is making you feel a bit stuck, here are three suggested moves that can help unstick the situation.

Talk to Someone

By talking to someone we are involving a new brain and heart in whatever has us stuck.

Whether you talk to them about the issue at hand or a completely different topic, it can help.

Talking through the issue you are stuck on means you have to tell them the story about what’s going on. By telling the story, new perspectives or details (or solutions) can come into focus for you. In telling the story you can also ask the other person to offer their thoughts and observations and this brings a different way of thinking about the thing - which can be enough to break your stuckness.

Even when advice is not wanted or asked for, the experience of telling someone about a thing that is confusing you or has you wondering what to do and having that person listen to your story is hugely valuable - having someone just say, wow that’s a dilemma or that’s a big decision for you, validates your sense of stuckness and can ease it.

And the other great thing about talking to someone, even if it’s off the point about which you are stuck, is that it literally takes your mind off it. Chatting about something else gives your brain a break from the problem and brains, like every other part of us, need rest breaks!

Try Something

Action is often the solution to indecision.

By action, I mean some small step or intermediate decision followed by action.

By taking action, we can create clarity about options and consequences.

Taking action, even a small step, helps bring us forward and out of stuckness.

Several small steps will compound over time and may well resolve an issue without the need for a full and final decision and plan of action.

It can be useful to treat small steps and actions as experiments - by trying something out without being overly attached to the outcome, we can learn from the experiment and use that knowledge to refine our next set of experiments and small steps.

Move Somewhere

Sometimes just moving to another space can alter our perception of a problem enough to move it forward.

So, if stuck on something while sitting at your desk, try standing or moving room or go and stand by the window. If sitting in a desk chair, move to a soft seat.

Moving outside and walking is both soothing and stimulating for our brains. Walking promotes creative thinking and lets our brain mull things over while cooling down. Walking allows us let go of the mental effort we tend to apply when we’re task focused.

The beauty of this move is that going for a daily walk (which so many of us are doing right now) is good in itself, but there are also days when we get home from our walk with a fresh idea or realisation about something that’s been taking up brain space, so the walk ends up saving us time and effort.

Sometimes, letting go of the task or the specific mental effort and making a move, is just the thing we need to create forward momentum.