What To Do When You’re Feeling Stuck

I am a creature of habit. A practitioner of ritual. A devotee of routine.

Habit becomes comfortable. In an uncertain world, in an uncertain time, my routines and rituals give me safety. They are an oasis of predictability in an unpredictable world.

I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow but I know my day will start with Suja Fuel juice, moving my body, and meditation. I know I will write. I know I will publish something to my blog. This calms me. It soothes me.

And so it is easy to maintain.

That’s the thing about habits. For all the angst many people have about how to create new habits, and all the science around it, and all that has been written about the different approaches to doing it, habit creation is fairly simple. Even somewhat automatic.

And once you commit to it and stick with it for a while it gets comfortable.

Therein lies its problem.

To much automaticity can cause us to get stuck.

Even the most effective rituals can become habitual and lose their juice.

And, we humans are creatures of comfort. We tend to stick with what we know even when that comfort has become uncomfortable.

This is why creating new habits is hard. It’s not the creating itself that’s hard; it’s the destroying what we’ve been doing — breaking the old habit.

That’s why I always say:

It’s harder to break a habit than to create a habit.

A common mistake I see many people make — especially high achievers — is that they try to change too much at once.

There are times when that is called for — a wholesale tearing down of everything, complete destruction to rebuild. AND, it’s often counterproductive.

Your nervous system is smarter than your conscious mind. It doesn’t like big changes.

And big changes are often unnecessary. Don’t underestimate the power of small changes can have a big impact.

One small change in the right place can trigger a cascade of other changes that amount to the bigger change you desired.

You may not know what the right change is. It may require some trial and error before you hit on the tiny change that will unlock a cascade of changes. Don’t let that stop you from making a change.

If what you do makes a mess out of your routine, that’s a reason to celebrate. It’s going to be messy. That’s the point.

The objective isn’t to get it right. The objective is to do something different.

Experiment. Have fun. Make a mess. Break free from your rut.