Stuck? Use This Question to Grease the Skids

Being stuck stinks!


It happens to the best of us.

I remember a specific coaching conversation with a brilliant leader who was stuck. 

She would have spent our full session going on about how awful it was if I hadn't
respectfully stopped her in her tracks with one question to grease the skids:

What have you tried so far?

Why did this question help?

She was focused on being stuck...on NOT having a solution.

And there was no known solution yet that she could focus on,
so her brain returned what it knew: which was that she was still stuck.

This question gave her something else to focus on.

What follows is a bit of our coaching conversation.

__________

I asked her to backtrack a bit to take inventory:

What have you tried so far?

She switched gears. She started using a different part of her brain to access the list of attempted efforts.

"Well..." she began..."I've done this, this, and this...Oh! And my team and I also tried this."

Great. What did you learn?

"I learned that none of it worked."

Ok. What else did you learn?

(Silence while her brain gears turned.)

"Hmmm...that's hard...what else did I learn? I guess I learned that I preferred
being stuck to some of the solutions we tried. That surprised me.
I also learned that my boss didn't freak out when I told him our attempts weren't working yet,
so that was good. And my team and I sat and laughed over one of our fails.
That was actually pretty funny now that I remember it."

Awesome. What do these learnings tell you...about YOU?

"Uhhhh...I'm not sure. Maybe that I don't give up? Maybe that we've made progress
by finding what doesn't work even though we don't have a solution yet?" 

(long pause for more client thinking)

"When I think about it, my team and I are pretty committed to each other in this process
even though it's been frustrating. I can tell that they trust me and that matters
as much to me as figuring out our problem."

Amazing! How does realizing the progress you've made and the
trust your boss and team have in you equip you to press on?

"Somehow I feel less alone than I thought I was. And I feel less pressure to perform."

That sounds energizing! How can you use this new-found energy to take another look at your problem?

"I want to be more creative than I have been in my approach so far. It might be time to take a risk or two.
I think there are some people on staff I could reach out to for support and ideas."

__________

WOW.

Did you catch the energy shift that happened in this conversation?

It's so subtle yet so powerful.

Here comes the direct application for you:

Bring to mind an unsolved problem you're facing today.

Scroll back up to the top and read through the conversation
as though I were face to face with you asking these questions.

What comes up for you?