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5 Ways to Overcome Mental Blocks
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Ask For Help
No one is truly successful alone and you can’t get different results by doing the same things. By asking for help, you benefit from someone else’s perspective and give them the opportunity to help solve a problem.
Just ensure that you ask someone whose opinion you trust and that has experience with similar situations.
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Change The Environment
Often, our blocks result from us getting stuck in an unwanted pattern of thought. It becomes a routine and eventually an unwanted rut.
Changing your inner or outer environment disrupts our routines and can be incredibly effective at helping us broaden our perspective. Ultimately, it’ll help us see new solutions to old problems.
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Change The Channel
Blocks arise when we focus on what we don’t want, instead of what we do want.
A good way to remove the block is to spend some time doing something completely unrelated to the problem you are working on.
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Seek Out Sweat Sessions
An effective way to get creative and circumvent blocks is to engage in high-intensity activities that ground you in the present. Anything that gets you into a different environment, preferably one with fresh air and nature, often does the trick.
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Hit The Shower
Blocks happen when we are not in the present.
Showers bring our attention firmly back to the present moment and allow us to relax, enabling us to develop more ideas and creative solutions to our problems. They also have positive effects on our health and outlook in life.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Freewrite
When you are feeling stuck, start writing about whatever is on your mind.
Set aside 10 to 15 minutes. It may start out as a page of gibberish, but soon ideas will start to flow.
Tackle smaller tasks first
If you feel overwhelmed by how little you have progressed, switch to working on mindless tasks that require little attention and allow the mind to wander. Wash the dishes, organize your bookshelf, or do laundry.
By accomplishing small wins, you develop momentum and confidence to overcome your mental block.
Change your environment
- Having a neat, organized desk will improve your productivity and focus.
- A messy space can enhance creativity and help you gain fresh insights.
Play around with your home or office environment and discover what works best for you.
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Creativity and problem solving
Creativity is about problem-solving. And creativity is also about finding problems to solve in the first place: perceiving them, defining them, explaining them, and recordin...
Diving and swimming
This technique requires 2 steps:
- Deep immersion into a subject matter without specifically looking for an answer to your problem.
- Letting go completely while you process that information (actually walking away from it), to allow good ideas to bubble up from the subconscious and into clear view.
Exaptation
This is the ability to reach beyond a specific field of expertise and create new uses for an older thing. It’s about taking one thing and using it for a different purpose than intended.
For example: Apply a cooking recipe to a marketing strategy or use a spreadsheet program to organize words for your poetry.
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Know your brain
Our response to difficult conversations is neurologically the same response to fear: the fight, flight, or freeze response.
When you feel that internal escalation,&n...
Assume good intentions
When we are in conflict, our view of the other person becomes so narrow that we do not see them as a fleshed-out person.
Try to assume that the other person is acting in good faith. That baseline assumption can get you through plenty of instances of misplaced tone and timing.
Body language speaks volumes
Good communication is a full-body experience. It’s how we breathe. It’s our tone. It’s our gestures.
Cultivate habits like keeping an open expression, avoid defaulting to crossed arms, and taking deep breaths to help change the tenor of an interaction.