Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths [Hardcover]

You will experience psychological impasse many times in your life. During these times, you have the sensation that you’re stuck or paralyzed. You’re convinced that something must change, whether in your work or personal life. Though this feeling is normal, you need to move beyond it. Failure to “get unstuck” can put your career and personal life—as well as the healthy functioning of your team or organisation—at risk.

In Getting Unstuck, business psychologist and researcher Timothy Butler offers strategies for moving beyond a career or personal-life impasse—by recognising the state of impasse, awakening your imagination, recognising patterns of meaning in your life, and taking action for change.

Drawing on a wealth of stories about individuals who have successfully transitioned out of impasses, Getting Unstuck provides a practical, authoritative road map for moving past your immediate impasse—and defining a meaningful path forward.

GETTING UNSTUCK emphasizes career and work crises but as you say in your
book - impasse does not differentiate between work and personal life. Does
your method help for situations other than the workplace?

The vision-building exercises I use in this book help individuals to move
closer to more meaningful work and a more meaningful life. The method is
relevant for anyone who has come to realize that something must change - in
a job description, in working habits, in a marriage, in a friendship, or in
an overly frenetic and frustrating way of living. The book is designed as
a journey; readers will move through a sequence of meditations, readings,
and exercises designed to take them through the full impasse cycle and into
a richer vision of work and life.

In GETTING UNSTUCK - you provide readers with what you call "Deep Dives."
Can you talk about these exercises?

My book is practical and meant to be used. Each chapter will lead the
reader in sequence through the six phase cycle of impasse and vision.
Throughout the book, there are highlighted self-assessment Deep Dive
exercises which allow readers to take the material they just read and focus
it immediately and specifically on their own life and situation. Two of
the most important exercises that I encourage readers to participate in are
the One Hundred Jobs exercise in Chapter 4 as it will provide an
experiential basis for many of the ideas discussed in later chapters, and
the Image Gathering exercise as it will add richness and texture to the One
Hundred Jobs exercise.

Is there a difference between impasse and depression?

Impasse often brings with it an intermittent heaviness of mood. During
times of impasse, it may seem that usually reliable resources for cheering
yourself up or thinking your way through problems are no longer effective.
You may feel that you are "not yourself" and that your familiar pleasures
and distractions no longer hold their appeal. You may loose sleep turning
over an important decision in your mind. In all of these ways, a career or
life impasse may mimic some of the symptoms of depression. But it is
important to realize that these symptoms, and the impasse experience, are
not, in themselves, evidence of clinical depression.

We can sum up the difference between these symptoms at impasse and during
an episode of depression in two words: duration and intensity. During
times of impasse, some symptoms may appear intermittently, but they are
rarely present all of the time for weeks on end. Their intensity is
typically much less than what individuals report during episodes of
depression. They may be painful but they do not shut down your ability to
move through your day and feel that you can meet the challenges in front of
you even if you feel "in the dark."

Buy psychological impasse might also come at unpredictable moments: when the career of a lifetime somehow loses its juice, when you ache for intimacy but can't seem to find the right partner, when you find yourself longing to renew a sense of life's adventure.

Predictable or not, psychological impasse brings with it the sense of being stuck or paralyzed. At the office, you feel stale or unchallenged. In your personal life, you feel agitated, deflated, or downright bored. You know that something must change-and you are desperate to contribute at work, find a reinvigorated role in your family, and dive back into the current of your own life.

Though uncomfortable, impasse is necessary: it's the only place from which you can define a new vision for your professional or personal life. In Getting Unstuck, business psychologist and researcher Timothy Butler leverages more than twenty years of research to offer strategies for finding your way, again and again, from impasse to renewed meaning-at work, at home, with colleagues, and with family. In this book, you'll: