Bite-Sized Teaching Series: The More Stuck You Feel, The Closer You Are To Freedom

So here's the cure to being stuck that you definitely do not want to hear. You're not stuck. Stuck is a feeling. It's not an actuality. And when you realize what creates that, and when you realize that you're actually not stuck, everything changes and it changes really quickly. So here's how the whole thing works. You think about something that you want. You think about, say, I want a promotion, and then you think about a way to get it. I'm going to ask my boss for a promotion. And then you think maybe another way to do it, oh, I'm going to just work really, really hard. And then you think maybe another way to get it, I am going to ask my boss's boss for a promotion. And then you look at those three options and you think, ooh, I don't like the consequences of any of these. And that's when you feel stuck. You feel stuck because you do not like the potential consequences of the ways that you see to get unstuck. So what does that mean specifically? Let's say I ask my boss and my boss is going to think that I'm uppity and then I'm going to try to do a great job. But I realize I've been doing a great job for 2 years and it hasn't got me a promotion. I don't want to be here for 3 more years doing a great job and not get a promotion. And then I think about talking to my boss's boss, and then I'm scared that they'll say, oh, you went over this boss's head, or my boss is going to get mad at me for going over their head. I don't like any of the options. I don't like the potential consequences. And so I must be stuck. So there are many issues with being scared of the consequences. One of the issues with being scared of the consequences is that you're thinking that there's only one way to do it. Right? So think about it this way. I'm gonna ask my boss for a promotion. Well, I could do that by saying, "I want a promotion." I could do that by saying, "If you don't give me a promotion, I'm gonna quit." I could do that by saying, what would it take for me to get a promotion? I could say it as, what would make you extremely excited to give me a promotion? There's all sorts of things that I could do to get that promotion, to ask for that promotion. But because I'm scared, and that's the critical thing, I'm scared of the consequences, I'm not thinking about all the solutions. I'm just thinking in a binary way, yes or no. Will it work or will it not work? Instead of, "Oh yeah, there's lots of different ways to do it that could make it work." The other thing that's happening because I am in fear is that I see this false end. I get thought of as greedy or presumptuous for asking for a promotion. But what does my boss think about me the next day? And the next day and the day after that and the month after that and the year after that? How often do you change your mind about somebody? How often do you think, "Oh, that person's needy," and then you find out that they're not? So the other thing that fear is doing in that situation is it is limiting you to thinking that there's an action and there's a consequence, and then there's nothing beyond the consequence. So we're sitting here thinking that we're stuck because we're scared of the consequences, and the fear of the consequences is making it so that we can't see all the optionality that we have. And the reason that this is happening, like deep down, the reason that this is happening is that we are choosing perceived safety over risk. We are thinking, "Oh, we will be safe if we don't make any action, and we will be at risk if we take an action," which is just simply not true. But it's how we feel, because again, being stuck is a feeling, it's not a reality. And it's a feeling that really gets driven by fear. I was once working with a vice president of a really big organization, and she was worried about starting her own company. She was like, ah, yep, maybe I'll fail if I start this company. And so I started asking her a series of questions. I started saying, well, let's say 2 years you fail. Are you more hireable or less hireable than before? And the answer was more hireable. She had more skills, she understood more, she had more of an entrepreneurial spirit. All those things would make her more effective as a vice president in any big company. So she's more hireable. And I said, yeah, and what do you think about your ability to succeed in a big company if you had started your own thing? Oh, I could succeed a lot more. And so there's this perceived risk. There's this potential risk, but it's actually a lot less risky than staying as a vice president in a company. And when we looked at that, It became really clear. I said, like, what's the lifespan of a vice president in your company? And it wasn't very long. It was like maybe 3 or 4 years. She'd already been in it for 2 years. So they fired as a vice president or failed as a CEO, like, which one's actually the bigger risk? So what's actually going on there is the perception is that we are trading safety for risk, but what we're actually trading is the known for an adventure. What we're actually trading is the known for the excitement. And that gives us a clue as to one of the things that we can do when we feel stuck. We can feel excited. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And let me go into them. The first one is that in our brain, neurologically speaking, our fear and our excitement are really wired in a, in a very similar way. So oftentimes we confuse the two. As a matter of fact, you can think of fear in two ways. There's the fear of, oh my gosh, I'm going to die. I'm at mortal risk, which we very hardly ever feel. And then there's the fear of, oh, I'm going to get on stage. Oh, I'm going to walk into a bigger room. Oh, somebody might not like me if I'm who I am. And this is like stepping into a bigger room fear. And that actually has a lot of excitement in it. It's a calling. It's an adventure. And yeah, we might be scared on the adventure, but we're excited by the adventure too. And so we can really feel the excitement move. We can see the fear more clearly and we can see what to do much quicker. And so there's a really simple technique to do this. It's really, really simple. The next time you're noticing that you feel stuck and you're scared of consequences, just say to yourself, I'm excited, 10, 20 times, particularly about the thing. Like, I'm excited to ask for I'm excited to ask for a promotion. I'm excited to ask, I'm excited to start my new business. 'Cause there's some truth in it. If there's something in you that wants it, there is some part of you that is deeply excited about it. And if you hold that excitement back, if you're not feeling it, it's gonna come out as fear. It's gonna come out as anxiety and it's gonna come out as you feeling stuck. Another way to move through this stuckness is to actually see that what you think is safety is often stagnation, and what you think as risk is often iteration. So think about it this way: you can only fail if you actually stop trying. How many companies do you know did the same thing over and over and over again and still exist? How many people do you know who stagnated in a marriage had a successful marriage? How many people that you know choose no new adventure, nothing exciting, and then have a life that you wanna live. So there actually is no safety in stagnation. And the reason that the iterative mindset works is that if you are a human, or actually if you are any vertebrae, what you have is something called the Habenula. And the Habenula basically teaches you not to fail at the same thing over and over again. And that makes a lot of sense. If you are a bear and you just got your butt kicked because you were trying to get mating rights, you don't wanna go do that again. Or if you are a squirrel and you eat a mushroom that makes you sick, you don't want to go and do that again. So we have a part of our brain that is geared to make sure that we don't fail over and over and over again. So if you see what you're doing as a potential failure, then you're probably not going to want to do it. But if you see what you're doing as an iteration, if you can see your life as a constant set of iterations, Well, then there's no problem. We just call that practice. We don't feel like we fail during practice. We're just practicing. Then it's really easy to see through that fear and to see what's actually there, which is excitement. Safety comes from actually constantly growing and constantly moving to the next thing and constantly feeling that excitement, that pull, that urge for adventure so that you can become the thing that you wanna be. Safety is in the evolution. Safety is not in stagnation. So if you want to go more into procrastination and getting unstuck, we have a microcourse that's free. It's easy, it's fun, and you can click the link below.