Sometimes when we face a problem, we end up thinking ourselves into a rut. Our brain ends up going around and around. It’s like entering a roundabout only to find all the exits have been blocked off.
Thought-ruts leave us feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, especially when we’re on our own. In this episode of Curly, Calm and Curious, I share an example of where I found myself caught in a thought-rut and how I worked my way through it.
If you are working from home, you may have found yourself falling into more thought-ruts than usual. Part of the reason for that is that we have less interaction with others and therefore, less opportunity to talk through ideas and problems.
One way to address this is to find a trusted colleague and draw your problem for them using simple shapes. (eg. stick-people, circles, squares, arrows etc). This will activate different parts of your brain and it will trigger questions that open up your thinking.
There is another critical benefit of this approach. Solving problems together can shift our energy from being negative (ie. feeling alone with an impossible problem) to positive (ie. having a shared sense of we’re in this together).