Stuck
There’s always a moment when you face stuckness. Actually there’s probably a plethora of moments. You get stuck all the time. Stuck in relationships. Stuck on a project. Stuck in a rut. Stuck in old habits.
Creativity’s arch enemy is stuck. Think about it. You have an idea that you’re stoked about. You can see it in your head. You are excited about it and you’ve even started dreaming about it. Yet, guaranteed at least one of those ideas is on the side of the road somewhere in the past where you abandoned ship and moved on. Or maybe there’s a current project that you’re working on. You’re committed to this one. It’s staring at you. But you are stuck. And it’s frustrating.
“...fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”— Steven Pressfield, _The War of Art_
So, what do you do?
I don’t have any two, three or ten step plan. My plan is a one step plan that you repeat as necessary. Remember that book We’re going on a bear hunt? It’s this beautiful children’s book that has a family going through fields and rivers and mud and a snow storm to find a bear. When they face each segment of their journey, a similar line repeats.
“Uh oh, a snowstorm.
A swirling, whirling snowstorm.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve go to go through it.”
That’s it. That’s the one step. If you want to get unstuck, the only route is through. You can crowdsource the problem, you can seek council. You can revise the scope etc, but at the end of the day you have to go through the stickiness. Its perseverance with heads down muscle-through-it. I find that in some situations, if I force myself to sit with whatever I’m stuck with I can muscle past the stuckness. I will clarify however that getting unstuck really just means that I can now get back to work. The tire is no longer flat. Whatever I’m stuck on is not waiting on a solution to then hit send or publish or print. The stuck is a roadblock in the creative process.