Are you doing stuff? Or doing stuck?

Does this sound familiar?

• There’s so much urgent stuff going on, you never get to the important stuff.

• You just need to do a little more planning, and then you’ll get started.

• You just need to do a little more research, and then you’ll know for sure what to do.

• You don’t have time for that difficult conversation with the underperforming employee. You’ll do it next week on Monday or Tuesday. Wednesday at the latest.

• Your strategy presentation/sales email/blog post is never quite good enough. It needs more revision. You might even have to begin from scratch.

• You feel you can’t get going with that project until your desk is clean, and you’ve meditated, and you’ve lost twenty pounds.

• You can’t launch that thing. It’s not perfect yet.

• You don’t want to talk about it.

You think you’re doing so much stuff. But really, you’re doing stuck.

In my tradition of coaching, we call this “having a Safe Problem”. We can spend years on our Safe Problems. They're wonderfully comforting. They make us feel important (I'm so busy!), give us variety (there's so much to do!) and connect us to those around us (because we get to complain about our safe problems all the time, and in turn, listen to others complain about theirs). All the while, we stay stuck.

In other words, Safe Problems are distractions.

What are they distracting us from?

Well, Quality Problems. The kind that when solved will advance us to a new level of achievement, professional status, or life stage.

The thing about Quality Problems is that they’re hard. Sometimes, really hard. And also, scary. They require us to take risks, make decisions, and put ourselves out there.  

So, you can see why we love our Safe Problems so much. As long as we’re focused on them, we can avoid dealing with the Quality ones. Things like making a career change. Or deciding to go to marriage counseling. Or finally doing something about that underperforming employee. Or having that really tough conversation. Or finally addressing those sinking customer satisfaction scores, or lagging production times, or declining revenue trends.

We don’t know if our quality problems are actually solvable. Or at least we don’t know if we’re up to solving them. And that’s scary. So, we avoid them. The perplexing thing is, we often don’t even know we’re doing it.

How to stop doing stuck

Ask yourself:

• What am I avoiding? i.e. What’s the quality problem?

• What’s the real challenge for me with this problem that is creating the avoidance?

• What am I predicting? i.e. What am I afraid of?

• What do I want? Sometimes we’re distracting ourselves because we don’t really care about or want the thing we’re working toward. If this is the case, maybe it’s time to reevaluate and perhaps let it go.

  
  

Now focus on the outcome:

• Ask yourself, “How can I… [solve the quality problem/arrive at the outcome}?”

Then:

• List all the obstacles that keep you from solving it.

• Knock each obstacle down using the phrase, “I can, if…”

• Build your plan of action.

• Ask yourself, “What has to happen for this plan to come to fruition?” Is it realistic? If not, go back to "I can, if..."

One last thing: A pro-tip from my brilliant friend and Expansive Woman Project board member, Dr. Cranla Warren:

Once you have a plan and you know what has to happen to make it a reality, let go of the outcome and shift your focus to the integrity of your inputs.

Outcomes can be months or years away. They rarely perfectly match expectations. So just let go and focus on what you’re doing today.

And then the next day.

And then the next day.

And before you know it, you’ll be unstuck.

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