Move Forward by Stopping

Do this and stop spinning your wheels!

Are you spinning your wheels trying to get where you want to be? Is frustration taking hold of your thoughts and emotions? Has the excitement you felt to reach your goal turned into grim, determined, painful striving?

I’ve been there before. I’ve set a goal full of hope. The first actions I took were fun and exciting, novel. But the fun and excitement of my anticipated future state turned into a tiring, anxiety-inducing grind over time.

I’ve experienced it when I set out to lose weight. When I was on the job market for over nine months, I felt this heavy energy too. I’ve even had this sensation while working on writing projects, including my latest book.

The problem with these feelings and the forced effort that follow are that they don’t feel good. They are not productive. And, they can leave you feeling hopeless.

In times like these, it can help to stop doing what you are doing, as counter-intuitive as that might seem. You want this thing — to be thin, to land a new job, to finish a writing project — so stopping your efforts just doesn’t make sense. But it can absolutely help you reach your goals with less stress.

What are you failing to notice?

Here is the thing, in your striving and pushing you are failing to notice important things that could ease your way and move you forward in faster, more productive ways. R.D. Laing puts it this way: “ The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

More succinctly, in the words of Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

I went on vacation seven months after having lost 75 pounds, and I gave myself permission to stop counting calories during that week. I would simply enjoy my vacation, including the delicious, foreign cuisine. I’d get back to calorie counting when I returned.

What I noticed during that trip was I felt happier. I was less stressed. And I began to feel good in my new, thinner body. I felt successful too, because, upon my return, I had managed to maintain my goal weight without the obsessive calorie counting to which I’d grown accustomed. After my vacation, I did go back to calorie counting, but in a much less “hell-bent” way. I’m happy to report that I’ve kept the weight off for over six years now.

When I stopped obsessing over every calorie I ate to maintain my weight loss, my efforts consumed much less antagonistic and draining energy. Surprisingly, my progress continued in a way that flowed. Before this brief hiatus from counting calories, staying at my goal weight felt like a chore. I didn’t feel happy or pleased even though I’d lost 75 pounds.

But How Can I Stop? It feels so weird!

So you might be saying to yourself: “Okay, stopping what I’m doing in service of reaching my goal more peacefully, even if only temporarily, could help me. But how do I stop? It feels unnatural or counter-productive to me.”

There is this cool tool called “Start, Stop, Continue” that will help you assess the actions you are taking to reach your goals. It highlights which activities are genuinely helping you reach your goals and which aren’t. It enables you to decide which steps to stop taking, which ones to start taking, and which ones to continue doing. I recorded a short video describing this system. Click here to view it.

Stopping, even for a brief period, gives you a break and a chance to see new perspectives. It can show you options you couldn’t see before because of your laser-focused effort. Additionally, stopping can give you some much-needed relief from the pressure you might be placing on yourself, inadvertently.

To thoroughly enjoy the benefits of pausing or stopping altogether, you must give yourself permission, fully, to stop. Otherwise, stopping could create another kind of stress. The stress of “I should be doing this, but I’m not.” This thought and the associated emotions will keep the fresh perspectives and new opportunities hidden from your view.

Again, you might be asking, “but how can I let go and stop without feeling guilt or anxiety about it?”

Stop Temporarily

One thing you can do when considering this technique is to commit to stopping an activity for ten days, one week, or even a day, instead of forever. At the end of this time, you can assess how stopping has helped you, how it made you feel, and what progress you made, in spite of stopping that activity. Then you can determine your next move. You can decide to:

• start this activity again with a brighter, fresher perspective
• continue to pause the action, temporarily or permanently
• start doing something new in place of the activity you stopped to forward your cause

Trust yourself to take a break. Give yourself the gift of this space, and watch your progress grow, see your effort begin to flow.