Feeling Stuck? 5 Steps to Unsticking Yourself

Olivia started a recent session complaining that her supervisor was micromanaging her. “I have to run everything by her, even a simple email,” she said. “She clearly doesn’t trust me or have respect for my work. I want to succeed at this job, but her attitude is making me want to stop trying. I feel like either giving her lousy work or just not doing anything.”

Source: ShotPrime Studio / Shutterstock

Terri was excited about getting married, but she felt stuck over the planning. “I have so many friends who’ve been thinking about their wedding since they were little,” she said. “They know the kind of place, the dress style, the flowers, and even the person they want to marry them. I have no ideas at all, and I can’t get myself to start figuring it out. My fiancé and I both want a simple wedding. Why can’t I plan it?”

Mateo had almost the opposite problem. “I have no idea what I’m doing at my new job,” he said, “but my boss acts like I already know everything. I appreciate that she has so much confidence in me, but I really could use some guidance. I feel like a really bad employee. And I’m starting to avoid doing some of my work. I’m not usually a procrastinator, but that’s what I’m turning into.”

Getting stuck isn’t always exactly the same thing as procrastinating.

Much has been written about procrastination. I like a recent article by Fuschia Sirois called “Two Counterintuitive Ways to Stop Procrastinating,” and my earlier PT posts about procrastinating also have links to other articles on the topic.

Like Terri and Mateo, you might be having trouble figuring out how to get where you’re going, which makes it hard to move in any direction. Or, like Olivia, you might know what you want, or need, to do, but something might be interfering with your ability to move.

Breaking tasks into bite-sized pieces can help, but sometimes this is not enough.

We’re often told not to look back. But when you’re stuck, sometimes the past can help you move forward.

We know that our past affects our present and future, but not everything is a result of parental failure. When a client is stuck, I encourage them to remember past times when they were stuck. Then I ask them to talk about how they moved forward.

Olivia remembered arguments with her mother about cleaning her room. “The more she nagged, the less I did,” she said. I asked for details, and Olivia said, “When I finally convinced her to stop reminding me, I still didn’t clean it up on my own. One day she came into my room and said, ‘I’m not telling you what to do, but would it help for me to make some suggestions about how to do it?’ I’m still not a neat person, but I use some of the tools my mom taught me to this day.”

I asked Olivia to tell me about the tools. “First you go around and pick up and put away anything that you can. You put dirty clothes in the clothes basket, toys and books on the shelves, and trash in the trash can. Then you choose one type of object, like coloring books or papers, and you figure out where you can put them. And then you pick up everything that fits in that category.”

I asked if any of that process could help her in her work now.

She looked blank for a minute and then she said, “Oh. Wow. Maybe what I’m doing isn’t what my boss wants. Maybe I can ask her to show me her organizational system. Then I can do it myself.”

Mateo, who had been a “perfect” student, remembered a time when he had admitted to his social studies teacher that he didn’t know how to read a map. “It took me a long time to do it,” he said, “but, when I did, she was great. Because of her, I can read maps easily today.” Like Olivia, he took this memory back to his current situation. He told his boss that he didn’t know the company well enough to take off on his own with some things that she wanted him to take charge of. “If you don’t have time yourself, could you recommend someone else to help me see the bigger picture?” he asked her. “Then I’ll happily move forward on my own.”

Procrastination Essential Reads

7 Ways to Face Tasks You Dread

From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

She connected him with a colleague in a different department, who did just what he needed. “I think part of the problem was that I hadn’t recognized how busy she was,” he told me later. “And part of it was that because I was embarrassed about not knowing everything, I hadn’t framed my question in a way that helped her give me what I needed.”

For Terri, too, remembering an experience of being stuck helped reframe her current situation, which made it easier for her to proceed. “All the girls in my friendship circle were having sweet 16 parties,” she said. “My mom wanted to know what kind of party I wanted, and I couldn’t tell her. Nothing anyone else had done had appealed to me at all, and I couldn’t find a better idea. One day she said, ‘You know what sweetie? You don’t like parties. There’s nothing that says you must have one just because all your friends are having them. Let’s think of some other way to celebrate.'” That memory unlocked the door to Terri’s wedding plans. “It’s the same thing,” she said. “I don’t like parties. So why must I have one for my wedding?”

5 Steps to Getting Unstuck

1. Recognize that if you’re stuck, there’s probably a good reason for it.
2. Go back to memories of other times you’ve been stuck.
3. Look for moments when you somehow got unstuck.
4. Put the story of what happened into words—saying them out loud to someone else or writing them down can help.
5. Look for parallels between that story and your current situation. Can you adapt the solution from the past to the present?

In some cases, just having thought about how you solved a problem in the past will give you the fuel for solving the current one. But often it will also offer you a different perspective on the situation you’re dealing with now. And remember: Sometimes even a slight shift in how you are thinking about a problem can make a big difference in how you solve it.