There is a section in the popular career guide What Colour is Your Parachute? called – How to Get “Unstuck” . I randomly came across it while I was flipping through the book at a bookstore. When I eventually read it, sitting at the kitchen table procrastinating yet again, I cried all the way through.

For the last three years I seem to have been in hibernation. I’ve not been happy with where I live, what I do, or the path which seemed to be in front of me. I never wrote in my journal, never really analysed my life, and was too afraid to change anything. Every time I did think about my situation I couldn’t see a way out. None of my options seemed reasonable or sensible, I kept telling myself to just to put up with things, wait them out, or ignore them. Trouble is this continued for three years, three years of the only life I’m ever going to have.

I had thought the reason I couldn’t change was because there really weren’t any good options available to me. But when I read this section of Richard Bolles’ book I realised that the problem had not been lack of options, but rather the way I had been looking for these options.

In describing how to get unstuck Richard Bolles talks about two aspects of the self – the safekeeping self and the experimental self. The first is primarily logical and the second works through intuition. The safekeeping self always needs good reasons to change, it avoids risks, avoids getting things wrong, punishes itself for making mistakes, is cautious and suspicious, and generally is fearful. As depressing as it sounds, this was the primary way I had been approaching the problem – I had been trying to find the ‘right’ thing to do.

And this is what upset me so much. I had been tricking myself all this time. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have the right option available, but rather that I had becoming overly dependent on my safekeeping self for advice. I realised that attempting to change through logical, rule governed behaviour is self-defeating since these are the primary tools of the safe-keeping self. As Bolles writes, even though this part of your self might insist that it is the best one to help you out, it is lying! Instead, what can help you make changes is being open to the unexpected, to things which are surprising or even seemingly irrelevant, i.e. the gifts of chance.