Three Keys to Getting Unstuck

Three Keys to Getting Unstuck
Ken Christian

Ever gotten stuck? I’m talking about really stuck.

Maybe you were grooving along at a pretty nice pace pursuing some project or exciting new idea. Then kaboom! Without knowing exactly how it happened or what set it up, you came to a grinding and unceremonious halt. It’s perplexing when this happens and it doesn’t feel good. You can pretty quickly find yourself in a funk—puzzled, feeling powerless and a bit inadequate. It doesn’t matter whether you call it writer’s block, a flat spot or a creative lull. It’s easy to feel maybe even guilty, like being stuck is due to some personal flaw or inadequacy.

But here’s the deal. Getting stuck usually has its genesis in fear.

The fear could be one of the usual Big Three suspects: 1) fear of failure, 2) fear of the demands and future implications of success or 3) fear of making a big mistake. But sometimes the fear is subtler, more specific and originates in your particular personal history. As soon as the fear brain takes over, the rational thinking brain is switched off and the fear brain immediately engages a diverting or soothing strategy to get you to safety. So you end up derailed, thwarted, stuck or at minimum not making the progress you hoped for.

So what’s the way out? Here are 3 parts of an effective process for getting back on track from the stuck zone:

1) Resist the temptation to judge and criticize yourself.
The upshot of the fear and the crummy feelings that accompany being stuck is that it’s easy to attack yourself. And when you do, you immediately make matters worse. You infinitely expand something that might have had a very short life into a big-box-sized PROBLEM that now has a life of its own.

2) Understand how your brain is creating the current stuck pattern, so you can see through and past it.

A shorthand way of summarizing what goes on in the face of possible danger would be to say that, in those moments, the brain has a mind of its own. Instead of the frontal cortex being in charge, where planning and rational thinking goes on, the more ancient part of the brain takes over and prepares you to escape, do battle or freeze. This knowledge of how your brain works can give you a way to recognize what’s happening in the moment and interrupt the pattern before it takes you off course.

3) Use mindful awareness to catch your fear brain in the act and make a new choice.
Research and clinical evidence supports a different strategy from merely trying to force your way through being stuck by exerting more willpower. Instead of self-attack, mindfully examine what the brain’s resistance to further action might be about. By emptying yourself of judgment, and carefully tracking what’s happening inside, you can learn to identify what this primitive part of your brain is experiencing as a red flag. And once you change your perspective in this direction, self-attack melts away, you become grateful for your brain’s wise protection and entirely new possibilities arise for how to deal with the situation you face.

Sometimes, it only takes a moment.

I was working with a new mentoring client recently and for several years the way he understood his career had left him at a major impasse. He was self-accusatory and called himself unassertive. I suggested to him that he merely consider that there might be a positive reason for his hesitancy to move forward. Literally, within less than a minute he was in a completely different state, flooded with happiness and seeing his situation completely differently from how he had construed it.

What might your fear brain be protecting you from?

Guest blogger Ken Christian is is a licensed psychologist whose sole focus for the last twenty years has been helping individuals, parents, educators and organizations and their leaders remove limitations and maximize potential. He is the founder of the Maximum Potential Project and the author of Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement and the co-author of An Invitation to Personal Change

If you would like to learn more about how to transform your own stuck patterns, Ken Christian is hosting a free teleseminar July 26th, 2011 called Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone. It is open to everyone, for details on how to Break Out, visit Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone

This entry was posted in Guest Blogger and tagged fear, guest blogger, happiness, Obstacles to Happiness.