A 10 minute exercise to… become unstuck!

Here is the first in my series of 5-10 minute powerful exercises designed to help a) make significant transformations to your habits and thinking and b) get you on track to actually making the changes you feel are both necessary, and often long overdue!

One big issue that I come across with clients I work with is that frustrating feeling of being stuck. This can happen at almost any point in our lives for all sorts of reasons, whether they be personal, professional... or a combination of the two. Feeling stuck makes us feel confused and annoyed that we can’t get out of the ‘woods’ or make a clear decision about a course of action. For lots of people, it’s often a case of sticking their head in the sand, pretending it’s not happening and living a life almost on auto-pilot to avoid facing up to what needs to change. Ultimately, if we don’t do something about it, it can lead to plummeting energy and self-esteem, and really no sense of focused action.

While it is a really good idea to talk through options and solutions with a trusted friend or coach, here is a tried and tested, interesting exercise to get the mind and body engaged with its stuck-ness and start to begin to find a way out of it.

An exercise for getting unstuck.

• Go into a room (or outside space?) of your choice.
• Stand and look around the room or space to become familiar with it.
• Go to somewhere in the room or space and find a place where you can think about and feel stuck.
• Explore this experience in your head. What does it feel like to be stuck there? What else do you notice about being in that place? It may help to speak these thoughts out loud.
• Move somewhere else in the room or space - somewhere that makes you feel more liberated or free.
• In this new place, imagine that you no longer have this limiting situation. Explore this new experience. What is different about you in this place? What do you know in this place that you didn’t know in the other? What advice would you give to the person in the ‘stuck’ place
• Reflection: what do you now need to do get greater clarity to move on from this ‘stuck’ experience?

Try this exercise several times to help get your mind fully in gear in terms of what is causing you to feel stuck and possible solutions to this. Keeping a record of this experience either verbally recorded or written down can help hugely in gaining that all important need for clarity and direction.

Being stuck can be a hugely frustrating experience that calls for strength and bravery to face it full on. However, once you are able to ‘bite the bullet’ and overcome this, you should begin to experience a sense of much needed liberation appearing in its place...