Sometimes in our career we feel stuck and impasse in a vicious circle of unpleasant and un- happy events. Things don’t come up as easily and as expected. Performance degrades and behavior changes radically from productiveness to unproductiveness. Such times and cycles are common to every human beings particularly to business peoples and technology professionals.
- How do we decouple ourselves from such periods?
Timothy Butler, a professor at Harvard Business School tried to address these issues in his book Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths.
Impasse reminds us that we must respond according to the situations. We should also know that changes are necessary to survive in competitive world. But changes are not as radical as changing ourselves. We may not succeed in changing ourselves at all, rather we should change the way we work.
- Find the root cause:
Sometime it is difficult to know the root cause of impasses. Conflicting career aspirations may decrease performances. Giving precedence to one aspiration will create others in halt, thus causes anxiety. Unfulfilled wishes and goals create a sense of depressions and frustrations. It’s important to recognize a state of psychological impasse .It shows that this state is in fact the beginning of a necessary change in the way we think and act.
- What are the options?
Though it’s difficult to realize the root nonetheless its worthwhile to sit back and have a thorough analysis. Then we can prioritize goals we need to achieve based on our passion and love. Subsequently can start work on that. Impasses should be treated an impetus to change our outlook to a problems to get us motivated to work efficiently.
In his book Butler talks about 6 steps in recognizing the an impasse and overcoming it–arrival of a crisis, deepening of the crisis, recognizing the crisis, going deep into the crisis by listening more, understanding our own needs and opportunities available, and finally taking actions towards achieving our goals.
Find out more here.
.
.