Feeling Stuck?

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

It was (possibly) Einstein who said that problems can't be solved using the same thinking that created them. Solving problems often requires new types of thinking. Einstein was trying to solve a very slight discrepancy in the precision of the planet Mercury, but to do so he had to abandon the Newtonian clockwork universe, and even the very concept of a universal time, to come up with a completely new concept of four dimensional spacetime. Now that is a fairly extreme example of new thinking. Most of us don't need to so anything quite so mind bending, but new ways of looking at problems can have enormous results.

If you are solving the same problem over and over and you know the problem will keep happening, are you really solving it? Or are you just treating symptoms? Maybe you need to look deeper at the problem and see if there is something that you can do to find and fix the deeper problem. If you feel like you are working hard and not achieving, just working harder won't help. Maybe you need to take a look at your workflow, or your plans, or your goals to turn that around?  If you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is happening, maybe you need to look at doing other things?

Of course that's really easy to say. It's much harder to do. For a start, you need to realise that new thinking is required. For that you need to be aware that your current thinking is causing you to be stuck. That means seeing beyond your feeling of general dissatisfaction, your immediate frustration, your feelings of anger at the person causing the problem this time and so on. Recognising that you are stuck is the first step. But once you recognise it, what can you do about it? How can you bring new perspective to your problem?

You could use a tool like the 5 Whys of lean (asking “Why?” five times to try to dig into the root cause of problems), or a futurespective, or an appreciative inquiry process. These tools are designed to help people think in new ways about old problems. They help you look at problems from a fresh perspective. In the case of the 5 Whys, it's the perspective of “is there a deeper problem to be solved here?”. Futurespectives look at the problem from a future state where the problem has been solved and work backwards from there. Appreciative inquiry looks at what the strengths are in the current situation rather than focusing on the problems. All interesting and useful ways to look at an old problem in a new way.

Another trick you can use is to look at the problem that is making you stuck from someone else's perspective. What does it look like from outside of you? If the problem is with an interaction with another person or group, look at the interaction from their perspective and see if you can see why it's happening. If the problem is to do with the way your job is structured, look at it from the perspective of a co-worker. How would they see your job? If the problem is with a relationship, look at it from the other person’s perspective and try to see why they are behaving the way they are (or why you are behaving the way you are).

You can try to see the problem as part of something bigger - is this a symptom of a larger system or pattern? We call this the balcony perspective - it's like getting off the dance floor where you are caught up in the action and can only see just what's around you and getting up on a balcony to look down. Once you are above the action you can see patterns and structures that weren't evident before. You can see that the crush on one side of the dance floor is caused by the long lines for the bar encroaching on the space. Once you can see the problem you can work out how to fix it (more bar staff or route the queues elsewhere). 

The final, and probably easiest, trick for getting fresh perspective is to go out and get a fresh perspective - ask someone else. Go talk to someone about the problem and see what they think. Talk to a co-worker, a friend or your partner. A fresh pair of eyes on a problem can bring totally new thinking. 

This is where people like coaches come in very handy. Not only do they bring fresh perspective and often heaps of experience, they can also bring tools and techniques to help encourage and enable new thinking. It's that combination of fresh perspective, experience and their training in tools and techniques for thinking differently about problems that makes a coach one of the best tools for getting unstuck.