What to do when you just don’t know what to do
When we’re facing any kind of change in our lives, it’s not unusual to arrive at a point where we feel a bit stuck and don’t know how to move forward. Not only do I see this every day when I’m working with clients, but I also experience it in my own life: sometimes, we just don’t know what to do! Maybe we know where we’re ultimately heading - or at least we have an idea of the general direction - but it’s easy to get confused about how to get there.
For me, this often happens when I have ten different priorities and I’m juggling multiple things all at once. Or I might feel so overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the change I’m facing, that I don’t know where to begin.
As a coach, one of the approaches that I often recommend to my clients - and which I also use myself - is to try and ‘jolt’ someone’s thinking, just to shake things up a bit. This can help them to shift away from feelings of overwhelm and move towards more constructive thought patterns, just by encouraging them to look at a situation in a different way.
You may have heard people say, “think about what so-and-so would do in your situation”. It could be anyone - Richard Branson, Brené Brown, Nicola Sturgeon, Beyoncé! - it doesn’t matter; imagining what a focused, high-achiever would do if they were in your shoes might be helpful for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone. In my experience, there are much easier and more effective ways to jolt someone’s thinking and help them (and me) decide on the best course of action.
One of the super easy techniques I often recommend is to simply look at what’s in front of you. It can be anything at all, it doesn’t really matter what. For example, if you’re sitting at a desk then there should be plenty of things to choose from, however boring and uninspiring they might seem. You can start with something as seemingly mundane as a stapler and ask yourself, “how would a stapler handle it?” Sounds daft, I know, but hear me out. A stapler works by putting things together, keeping things orderly and focusing on one thing at a time. We all know they don’t work well when they fire out more than one staple at once - they get all jammed up. Well, we’re no different really. We also need to approach our problems one at a time, focus our attention on an individual task and try not to get bogged down by trying to do everything at once. Because when we do, we get all jammed up too.
Another good example is a clock: a clock always keeps moving, it doesn’t stay still (provided the batteries are charged, but that’s a whole other blog!). The hands of a clock constantly go round and round in cycles, but always eventually return to the same time. In the same way, we also need to keep moving if we want to move forward in our lives. Try saying to yourself, “I’m going to make sure that I keep moving forward, taking small actions, even if they’re not always right”. Most importantly, remember that everything goes in cycles and eventually comes right back to where it’s meant to be.
You can apply this method to almost anything, big or small, whether you’re trying to work out what to do with the kids this weekend, having difficulty finding time to get to the gym, or trying to work out what your next important life step is. What I’m getting at is this: you can take inspiration from anything around you, it doesn’t have to be anything special or even anything particularly interesting. A stapler will do, or a clock, or whatever comes to hand. Try it out for yourself and see how you get on. Because when you don’t know what to do, the first step is just to get started…
