Feeling Stuck? Give up!
This is counter intuitive advice, and yet I’ve seen it work time and time again. When someone comes to me for one-on-one coaching, they tend to be preoccupied with something. Often it’s been something that has been on their mind for months or even years. It’s not uncommon for someone to blurt out at some point in that first conversation, “I feel stuck!”, with some degree of exasperation and frustration.
As a response to this, I typically ask what strategies they’ve tried to resolve the problem and how much thinking they’ve had about the challenge. Most of the time, responses include a long list of tactics employed with limited success, several books they’ve read on the subject and all the people they’ve spoken to for advice. In other words, they’ve done, and continue to do, a whole lot of thinking on the subject.
And in this realization lies the real problem!
Albert Einstein is often paraphrased as saying, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
What I’ve come to see in this quote is that the thinking that is having us perceive the issue as a problem, can not be relied on to solve it. Here’s what I mean.
We have a powerful ability in our conscious analytical mind. It helps us compute mathematical equations, it allows us to debate two sides of the same issue, and it allows me to write these words and formulate these sentences to share with you. An amazing capacity that we depend on and leverage on a daily basis.
However, when we believe that a complex challenge presents itself, and by complex I mean not easily solved, we depend on this capacity to weigh pros and cons, try on different perspectives, and analyze the issue to attempt to find the right path forward, and instead stay stuck in the debate.
When I worked at Brookfield and was tasked with putting together a business case for a line of business we were contemplating entering, I would start with gathering information about the market. I did what every MBA student is taught; evaluate opportunities and challenges, compare them with corporate capabilities and recommend the best option for making a return on investment. A wonderful use of our analytical mind!
What I was less privy to at the time, and is almost never mentioned in business is that my research, analysis and conclusions were inherently biased. They were always filtered through my internal GPS system - my common sense meter. I may not be conscious to this filtering process, but it’s happening all of the time. Our analysis is not neutral and unbiased, it can’t be because what we see is dependent on our perceptions, mindset, thoughts, habitual patterns, experience, etc. That’s true of all of us. We are complicit in our work.
Why does this matter? Because when we’re feeling stuck, it means that despite all the analysis we’ve done, something is not adding up. And understanding how the mind works leaves us with only a few options to explain what is actually happening.
You simply don’t know. The analysis is not clear and your inner GPS system has no preference. This is similar to Waze when it offers multiple routes with similar travel times. In this instance, it really does not matter which route you take. You can pretty much use a coin toss to make the decision or wait until things clear up and you know how to proceed. The only way this feels uncomfortable is if we think we SHOULD know. There is nothing inherently problematic about not knowing or waiting until we do.
Your GPS system knows, but you’re still waiting for your analysis to guide you. This is often the case. At some level you know exactly what you want to do, but because your analytical mind is able to offer pros and cons to what you want, you get stuck in the debate rather than following your knowing. The only issue here is that you’re looking for an answer from the wrong tool. It’s like using a hammer to screw in a nail. You can try as hard and for as long as you like, but it will either not work or make things a lot harder than they need to be.
Your analysis is clear, but your inner GPS system wants to follow a different path. This is where people usually say they need courage to follow the path they know they want to take, rather than what they refer to as the “safer” route (what the analysis points to). While this made total sense to me before, today it sounds inherently flawed and curious. Here’s why. How can analysis that is by it’s very nature biased, not all encompassing and based on a limited number of variables at a point in time, be safer, more accurate, or more dependable than the inner GPS system that has been evolving, adapting and guiding living organisms for almost 4 billion years! I’m not suggesting that our inner GPS system never gets it wrong, I don’t know whether it does. But thinking that an adaptive system that has been evolving for billions of years is less safe than an analytical process that is by it’s very nature limited, biased and a mere glimpse in time sounds strange to me. There’s certainly utility to analysis and computations, but it’s not the full story or even the most important tool in our toolbox. As the saying goes, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
My coach tells a story of a company that tasked their engineers to come up with a way to reduce production time by months in order to stay in business. For 6 months the team worked day and night attempting to avoid bankruptcy. At the end of the 6 months they were no closer to finding a solution. Having admitted defeat, the CEO tells the team to go home, relax and spend some quality time with their families. The next morning, as the CEO enters the company parking lot, he is surprised to see several cars already there. As he walks in, a number of engineers approach him with new ideas on how to reduce production time. They implement the ideas, are able to stay in business, gain market share and grow revenue. By giving up, the team was able to settle their mind for new and fresh ideas to come through. Ideas that eluded them for 6 months, flowed effortlessly when they settled.
When leaders are feeling stuck, they tend to think that they need more data, more analysis, better strategies. But this is rarely what is needed. If it were, they would not feel stuck, they would simply go gather what they need. By the time they feel stuck, they tend to have pretty good data, they’ve researched a multitude of strategies and we’ve gone through their analysis a few times.
Unfortunately, at this stage they are seduced by the idea of working harder to find the answer because that’s what they’ve been trained to do, but what if their “efforting” is the very thing that is keeping them stuck?
What if instead of trying harder, the best answer is to give up. Let go of the steering wheel. It always delights me to see how much is resolved without any effort on our part, how many times a big problem doesn’t look like a problem at all once we settle, and how many fresh ideas simply occur to us when we don’t try so hard.
So to end where we started, when you’re feeling stuck, give up!