What if you’re not actually stuck?

I know it can feel as though you are.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about the same decision for weeks and still don’t know what to do.

Or there’s something you want to change, but every time you think about it you come up against all the reasons why you can’t.

After a while, “I feel stuck” quietly becomes “I am stuck.”

And that’s quite a significant shift.

Because once being stuck looks like a fact about our circumstances, we naturally start looking outside ourselves for whatever needs to change before we can move forward.

But what if the thing keeping us stuck isn’t the situation itself?

When our thinking looks like reality

One of the things I’ve found particularly useful in the work of Jamie Smart and Michael Neill is the understanding that we experience life from the inside out. We’re not simply experiencing what’s happening around us; we’re experiencing our thinking about what’s happening.

Most of the time, though, it doesn’t feel like that.

If I’m thinking I don’t know enough yet, that something is too risky or that I need to work everything out before I make a move, those thoughts don’t feel like thoughts. They feel like an accurate assessment of the situation.

So I respond accordingly.

The more convincing my thinking becomes, the fewer possibilities I can see. And because I can’t see another way forward, that seems to confirm that I really am stuck.

More thinking isn’t always the answer

My own tendency, and I know I’m not alone in this, is to try to think my way out of things.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking something through. The difficulty comes when we assume that if we just keep going for long enough, clarity will eventually appear.

Sometimes the opposite happens.

We get so caught up in trying to find the answer that we lose sight of what we already know.

Both Jamie Smart and Michael Neill point towards something I’ve seen repeatedly in coaching: we see things more clearly when we stop trying so hard to work them out.

Clarity appears when the noise quietens.

A client can spend much of a conversation explaining why something can’t happen and then suddenly see it differently. It might be something I’ve said, although very often it isn’t. There’s simply been enough space for their mind to quieten and for another possibility to occur to them.

Their circumstances haven’t changed. What they can see from within those circumstances has.

How stuck is “stuck”?

How fixed is that feeling of being stuck, really?

Because we all know that our thinking changes. Something that feels impossible late at night can look surprisingly manageable the following morning. An answer we’ve spent hours searching for can occur to us while we’re walking the dog or making dinner.

So when I notice myself thinking “I’m stuck”, I try not to take that conclusion quite as seriously as I once did.

It doesn’t mean I ignore practical difficulties or pretend there’s always an easy answer. Sometimes circumstances genuinely are difficult.

But the feeling of being stuck is still telling me something about the thinking I’m experiencing in that moment, rather than giving me a reliable prediction of what is or isn’t possible.

Which makes me wonder…

If ‘I’m stuck’ wasn’t true, what might you see differently?

Until next time,

Cath

P.S. This is very much part of the way I work with clients in The Coaching Adventure. My role as a thinking partner isn’t to give you the answers, but to challenge the thinking that may be making your situation look more fixed than it really is, and create the space for you to see what else might be possible. If you’re curious about what it would be like to have someone alongside you doing that over a longer period of time then let’s have a conversation….DM me at cdaley@cathdaley.com