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7 Unexpected Ways to Get Around Mental Blocks
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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Key Ideas
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.
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.
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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Take A Break
When you’re working on a big project, taking a real break is important for mental productivity.
Stop the project you’re working on, take some real time away, and come back to it with a fresh mindset. It doesn't matter how long the break is, the important thing is to not think about your project during your time of rest.
Mind Map It
A common reason for feeling stuck on a project is because there’s too much information to process, causing you to lose clarity on your end goal.
Mind mapping is a visual note-taking style to help you get your ideas out on paper. Essentially, you’re making a map of how all of your ideas relate to one another. Start with one central idea, like the overall project goal or just a piece of it. From there, think about the major tasks, goals, or ideas behind the projects.
Try A Change Of Scenery
Getting out of the space you associate with your project can help bring an unexpected shift in your perspective.
Try to get away from the setting you’ve been working in. Do you work from home? Try a new location like a coffee shop, library, or coworking space. Work in an office? Go offsite with your team.
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Benefits of a learning culture
During the last recession, companies that invested in their employees, in part by providing the training they needed to move forward in their careers, enjoyed profit gains of 26 percent, compared to losses of 14 percent at companies that were worst at this type of engagement.
When hiring, screen for learners
- Ask about passion projects. Learners tend to pursue something else outside work (training for a marathon, playing with a band, etc.)
- Focus on curiosity as much as hard skills. Bring up problems currently facing the team and see how the candidate responds.
- One of the most important things to a learning mindset is the ability to admit you don't know something. So be aware of how they approach the things they don't understand.
Learning as a company policy
This means explicitly defining ongoing learning as a core company value.
Empowering employees can mean providing the time or money to enable learning - in other words, offering learning opportunities as a job benefit like health insurance.