Ready to move from feeling stuck to finding your flow? In this episode, Klaudia shares five practical, science-backed exercises to help you shift out of fear and overthinking and into energy, curiosity, and purpose. Tune in!
Hello everyone, my name is Klaudia. Welcome back to the Happiness Challenge podcast, all about the science of happiness.
This month on the Happiness Challenge we are exploring a really interesting topic of how do we move from stuck to flow.
So in the episode 201 I was joined by psychologist, leadership coach and author Sarah Rosenhaller to explore what it really means to move from stack to flow.
And we unpacked together this idea of reconnecting, connecting with purpose and having conversations with people to help us to shift out of fear, overthinking and self doubt more towards that energy, curiosity and fulfillment. And in the episode 202, while we feel stuck, I have explored the science of feeling stuck.
Because you know me, I love science, but also it really helps me to understand what is happening in our brains to explore, experience those emotions. I also invited you to engage in reflective exercise to reconnect with your purpose.
And I really found answering the questions I suggested quite energizing. Just thinking about our purpose, thinking about our meaning, thinking about our actions in a different way.
And in this final Part three episode, I'm inviting you to experiment with small practical steps to really challenge your thinking and start moving in a direction that feels more purposeful. So I have five exercises for you to try this week to shift from stuck to flow. Let's dive in. Number one is journal on this emotion of being stuck.
So I think we often have lots of negative thoughts and fears running through our head, but we don't necessarily verbalize them or write them down and therefore they have quite unstructured way of existing.
So what I would really encourage you to do is write down what you are afraid of, what is the story you are telling yourself and challenge yourself to actually think what may happen if things went right. This is trying to turn our fear into possibility. It's interesting to try to answer such questions.
Okay, if I was not in the current situation, what would I do? What's the most ambitious action that I could take? Who can support me in exploring more options for change in the current situation?
Journal your thoughts, journal your ideas to get it out of your head. Number two, start setting micro intentions. I personally love this.
I love waking up first thing in the morning and before I even open my eyes, I take deep, few deep breaths. I think what I'm looking forward to and I'm setting an intention for the day.
And I think it's really powerful to be living and energizing ourselves throughout the day by asking what's my intention right now? And keeping it very simple and realistic, but also having this idea, this notion that every moment can be a fresh start.
We don't have to wait for beginning of the week or beginning of the month or for January. Every moment can be a fresh start. So think and ask yourself, if this is my new fresh start, what would I do differently?
I think it's a really powerful, simple question that can get us out of that emotion of feeling stuck. Tool number three is find local meaning. So my guest Sarah was talking about this idea that grand missions, grand visions, that's great.
But at the end of the day we need to think locally. We need to think right now, right here in this moment in time.
So notice one moment in your daily routine where your actions make a small difference to your colleague, to a customer, to family, member, to community and collect these.
Write them down as my impact moments I shared in my book the Alphabet of Happiness that I love having a folder in my Outlook in my emails called Feel Good folder where when I see, when I see the positive impact I made, the change I made, when I get some positive feedback, something that excites me, I put it in that folder so I'm able to look at it and review it to remind myself that yes, I am having an impact. Doesn't matter how small tool number four is, have one curiosity conversation.
So have the curiosity conversation with someone who is outside of your story, someone who doesn't understand your sector, someone who didn't maybe haven't gone on the same journey because actually meeting new people in the new places brings more learning and possibility. And we really need to understand this, that we naturally would want to live and be around the same people all the time.
So we're living in this small social bubble, but our immediate circle of friends and family tend to be exposed to the same information as we do because we have similar lived experiences, we have similar connections. So when we asking people who we know very well for advice, probably that advice would be very similar to what we are thinking.
Strangers provide you with diversity of thought and opportunities because they coming from different perspectives and they have different lived experiences. A researcher, Richard Wiseman, compares this phenomenon to being in a orchard full of apples.
Okay, so each day you stroll down in this orchard to collect some apples and at first it may not matter where you are wandering as apples are everywhere. But after a while, taking the same path every day means decreasing your chances of getting any fruit.
Only by venturing to the new parts of that forest will ensure that you return with a basket full of apples each day.
And the same absolutely applies to that idea of learning Connecting with people outside of immediate circle exposes you to new opportunities and often that's what sparks us to move forward. Number five final tool is think about alternatives. So try to get unstuck by creating different versions of your life.
And this exercise comes from Design your life book by William Bernard and it encourages you to answer the following question. How do you want your life look like in one, two, three or even five years time?
You can choose the timeline that you want to apply here and when you reflect on that approach, that question from three different lenses, your current path, how your life would look like in the future if you continue on the same path, you're not changing anything, you're continuing. How does it going to look like the second approach?
The second lens is your alternative path, what your life would look like if you took a different alternative path, what that could look like and your radical path.
Write down in details what your life would look like if you took a completely different path where money, social obligations and what people think was completely irrelevant. I love this exercise. I love this exercise because that radical path really encourages us to think okay, what if?
And that's exactly what we want when we're trying to get away from that idea of feeling stuck. Many times I wrote lots of different radical paths. It doesn't matter.
Like it doesn't necessarily mean we'll follow that path, but we're looking for those ideas, activities that reenergizes us and we look for those options, different types of options that we potentially could explore.
And of course like none of these three futures are concrete plans, but it's just again exploring different possibilities and hopefully helping you feel unstuck and inspiring you to try something different. Thank you so much everyone for listening. And thank you to those who are reviewing my book on Amazon and goodread.
It's amazing to see that there are lots of different reviews coming through.
A big shout out to Sam who wrote about the Alphabet of Happiness, that the book is a wonderful guide to the many practices we can all learn to cultivate happiness in our lives. I have read many self help books in my life and this is definitely one of the best. Thank you so much Sam. I really appreciate your kind words.
If you found today's episode helpful, sign up to my substack newsletter to receive this month's write up about how to get unstuck and move into purpose and fulfillment. And also in that specific newsletter you'll be able to download a reflective prompt to journal with purpose in mind.
As always, your support helps me to spread the happiness until next time. Take care of yourselves. I see you soon. Bye.
