Uncertainty Archives - Jennie Marlow

7 Ways to Unstick When You’re Stuck

May 5, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

When we feel stuck, getting our energy moving can feel like a Herculean challenge. It can even feel as if we are glued to wherever we are, with no hope of a remedy. Here is some practical advice for getting our stagnant energy to start flowing again.

Do something constructive. This can be something as mundane as washing up the dishes, making your bed or clearing a pile of clutter. It can be as simple as drinking a glass of water, eating an apple or talking a walk. It can be as fundamental as taking a deep breath and bringing yourself back to the now-moment from wherever your mind has taken you.

Challenge your thinking. When we are stuck, there is typically something in our now-moment that we are resisting with all our might. It is as if we have dug in our energetic heels and refuse to budge. Usually what we resist is not the thing itself, but what we imagine about it. So, ask yourself, “What am I making up about this?” There are usually a number of ways to look at something, so do yourself a favor and think of another, more constructive way to look at what you’re convinced is true.

Expand your awareness of what is possible. When we are stagnating, we have stopped being curious about possibilities. Expand your awareness of real, tangible potentials that can be actualized with the time, energy and money you have right now. Explore the alternatives to what you’re doing right now, and take care that you don’t prejudge a possibility before you have had a chance to investigate it to learn if it is a practical, achievable and beneficial step forward. If the potential you’re investigating turns out to be too big a stretch, then scale back and look for alternatives within your reach.

Break your pattern! Feeling stuck and stagnant follows a pattern. Find the pattern in your thought process, your behavior and your choices. Target something in your pattern and do one small thing differently to change that pattern.

Identify the source of your anxiety. Stagnation is nearly always a result of anxiety about the uncertain future. So stop that nebulous, anxious thought and ask yourself, “What is the specific uncertainty that is causing me to be afraid?” Once you have identified the uncertainty, it is usually easier to simply accept its presence in your now-moment, just for the time being.

Deal with one thing at a time. If you are feeling overwhelmed it probably means you’re taking on too much at once. You may not be able move a thousand-pound pallet of boxes, but you can probably lift and carry one 25 lb. box. Divide up the task at hand, and do what you can manage right now.

Take care of yourself. Rest when you’re tired. Eat when you’re hungry. Let that after-hours phone call go to voice mail. If you’ve been sitting a long time, get up from your desk and take a walk. Avoid medicating with alcohol, drugs or food. Don’t veg in front of the television or lose yourself in cyber space. The world won’t fall apart if you stop to look at a sunset, read a chapter in a good book, or slip into a hot bath. Taking care of yourself often depends upon learning to make your self-care a priority and in balance with the needs of those close to you.

Here’s the deal. Flow is a product of movement, and it can result from very small, incremental changes in the status quo. So if you’re stuck, move your body, move your mind, move your habits, and move your behavior. Movement is what you’re after. Movement is flow!

How to Become Aware of That Trickster, Your Unconscious

March 22, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

Self-awareness is absolutely fundamental to a life that works. That said, there is a trick to becoming conscious of what’s going on behind the scenes in that Stone Age brain of ours, especially as it relates to our out-of-power behavior patterns of which we can be strikingly unaware.

The truth is we tip in and out of clarity and power on the fulcrum of our fear of the uncertain future. Here we encounter the anxious mind, that part of our psyches that lurks in the shadows of awareness where it cannot be seen directly.

Our conscious awareness doesn’t readily track what is happening in the anxious mind, and because of this, the anxious mind can have a devastating effect on our behavior and choices. What we are conscious of while this is happening may actually be a massive projection that we have confused with objective reality.

While the conscious mind may be completely unaware of how the anxious mind is distorting our reality in this way, our behavior will always track the anxious mind perfectly, even when the conscious mind does not track the anxious mind at all. So, by observing our behavior patterns and patterns of interpretation (the story-lines made up in the mind), we are then able to indirectly track, with great accuracy, what the anxious mind is really up to.

The Stone Age brain we all carry around in our heads has an extraordinary faculty for pattern-recognition. When we use it to see ourselves acting out an unconscious pattern of behavior, suddenly we have a manifold increase in our power to change that pattern, and thus transform our lives for the better.

Lessons Learned from the Fish Slapping Dance

March 8, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

How we deal with life can look a lot like that hilarious old Monty Python sketch called, the “Fish Slapping Dance.” We can spend a lifetime dancing around our fears and issues, only playing at confronting them. Then every now and then, life pulls out a big uncertainty and gives us a good wallop.

Yes, we need to have a sense of humor about it! But more than that, in undergoing life’s surprises—when our assumptions about the future are challenged—there is so much to be gained by what we learn during the crisis.

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, said something pretty interesting back in November of 2008. He said we should never let a crisis go to waste, that during a crisis, we are often more willing to do things we would never consider when things are going great.

This is a bit of a two-edged sword, I admit. Frightened people are usually the most likely to do something reactive and, frankly, stupid. On the other hand, a crisis can create an opening for necessary changes that can happily be put off when everything is going smoothly. Let’s face it: the so-called “good times” can make us complacent.

Like in the “Fish Slapping Dance,” we all have the luxury of dancing around big problems for a while, but it’s often not until they knock us silly that we are willing to admit that a transformation is required of us.

Originally posted in 2010

Vision & Intention

July 6, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

In Part One of this series, Spotted Eagle discusses the Principle of Vision, describing how “vision” is different from a goal and how great visionaries see their world.

In Part Two, he discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

In this post, he describes how limitation, uncertainty, purpose and essence are vital to any intention that has the potential to deliver a fulfilling outcome.

In any now-moment, the universe lays before us only certain potentials and not others, and it also gives every actualizable potential a set of natural limitations. An experienced potter understands this. She realizes that potential outcomes which can fulfill her intention to create something out of clay are not unlimited. The clay is what it is, nothing more or less. Clay, like any material, has certain characteristics that limit what can be actualized from it. This is not a problem for the artisan potter because her imagination does not resist the clay’s natural limitations. She takes these limitations and her own level of skill into account as she cultivates her vision for the finished piece.

The artisan potter also knows, before she begins her work, what purpose she intends the finished piece to serve. While she may have a very clear goal for the finished piece, she also understands that uncertainty will make its own unique and valuable contribution to what results. She won’t know until the door of the kiln opens after firing whether or not the pot is even still intact.

Unlike the artisan potter, a person who is fixed upon his goal for the future will see uncertainty as his enemy and struggle against it in fear that his desire for the outcome will not materialize the way he had imagined. He may invest a great deal of energy and become rigid, striving to achieve his goal. He may eventually achieve it, but very often he arrives at his destination exhausted, only to find the joyfulness he had hoped to receive is not only absent from the process of achieving his goal; it is also absent from the result.

Intention is integral to vision, and if it is to serve our creativity even in creating our lives, it must necessarily take into account purpose, essence, natural limitations and uncertainty: the unforeseen, unanticipated and unimagined. Only vision honors these mysteries. Only vision can dance with the uncertainty through which the evolution of any creation takes shape.

Intention that is flexible enough to respond to real-world challenges has a realistic potential to succeed and result in a fulfilling outcome. When we hold a vision for our lives, like the artisan potter, we know the purpose we intend our vision to fulfill. We know the essences we want to experience. We have made a realistic accounting of our available resources and whatever natural limitations are actually present in the now moment. When our intention is set in this way, vision serves to free the investment of our energy so that it can deliver into our lives an outcome that is in alignment with our purpose and which carries the potential to deliver an experience of the essence qualities that give the result meaning and make it fulfilling.

Vision, Limitation & Uncertainty

June 30, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

In Part One of this series, Spotted Eagle discusses the Principle of Vision, describing how “vision” is different from a goal and how great visionaries see their world. In this post, he discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

When we look at the roots of the word conceive we learn that it comes from the Latin words that mean to join and to take. Clearly this infers something important about the conceiving that vision facilitates. Vision brings something together. It joins something that was once not connected, and through this process, it produces a result that is not merely the sum of its parts; it is something original.

When we conceive of something that does not yet exist, the fruit of this is inspiration. Here again, we can discover important clues in the root of a word. The word inspiration comes from the Latin word which means to breathe. Inspiration can be seen as the means by which we breathe life into what we conceive. We are inspired to take an action, to do something, to actualize that which we have conceived with our vision. This is a very different process from fantasizing about an imaginary future, setting a goal, and then devoting our efforts in an attempt to make the future conform to our goal.

For example, were we privy to the creative process of a cabinetmaker who is considering what to do with a very fine and rare piece of wood, we would be able to see a vision—the conception, inspiration and actualization— process in action. We would notice that the craftsman first observes and appreciates the wood’s possibilities. The board itself is something concrete and tangible.

However, it is this board’s potential which suggests something to the craftsman. He conceives something which brings together the board and an idea in his imagination, inspired by both the board’s potential and by its natural limitations. There may be a number of potential forms which this board inspires, but what finally dictates the craftsman’s choice is the essential nature of what it is he would like to create from this board and the purpose he would like the finished form to serve. If the purpose to be served by the finished object is to hold a collection of books, the craftsman will make his choice to create a book shelf, and he might design the shelf from a foundation of essence qualities like utility, versatility, durability and beauty.

Now, a very intriguing thing occurs when the craftsman takes his idea from conception to actualization. Artists and craftsmen understand something about the creation process which may be totally absent from the goal-based endeavor, and that is uncertainty. When we are trying to actualize something original from a vision, the unexpected, the unforeseen and the unanticipated are sure to affect the creation. The master craftsman does not flinch at this prospect. He understands that uncertainty and how he responds to the unexpected will help him to fashion a work of art into something unique and original.

In Part Three, Spotted Eagle describes how limitation, uncertainty, purpose and essence are vital to any intention that has the potential to deliver a fulfilling outcome.