Creatively Stuck

One of the more fascinating clients I ever worked with showed me how creative the human mind can be at maintaining problems.

When she came to me she was stuck reliving an old emotional memory. Nothing traumatic, but every time she thought about it she felt the same emotions all over again, as if the past was still happening.

It was interfering with her present, her performance, and her quality of life.

I had seen this hundreds if not thousands of times before, so I did what I usually do in this situation.

I asked her to step out of the memory (into a third person perspective) and put it on a screen in front of her, like watching a movie on a tablet. 

This shift in perception generally allows the person to stop re-living their memories and gain the perspective they need to analyze the memory and learn from it.

She closed her eyes and told me that she had followed the instructions and put the memory on a screen in front of her.

That’s when something interesting happened.

Instead of calming her, it seemed the physiology from her unresourceful state had intensified. 

That is quite an unusual response, so I became extremely curious about what was going on and asked questions to understand what had happened in her mind.

That’s when it became clear.

She hadn’t really stepped out of the memory. She was still in the original memory, and in that memory she imagined herself holding a tablet and watching the memory on the screen. She had basically put the memory inside the memory. Like Inception.

Instead of stepping out and gaining perspective, she had stayed in the same perceptual position and just added another layer inside it.

She had followed my instructions of ‘putting the memory on a screen’ perfectly, and still managed to maintain her problem. How fascinating!

I immediately validated her. I mean, what a creative strategy to preserve her problem!

This was actually one of the more creative strategies for remaining stuck that I had seen up until that point, and that session reinforced an important lesson in me.

She could have repeated that process to infinity and it would not have helped her to solve her problems. Stepping out of her unresourceful memories from the past using this strategy would be futile.

Because what matters most is not what you are looking at. What matters most is the perception you are looking from.

She changed what she was looking at, but she never changed where she was looking from, so every level of reflection would be governed by the same higher frame.

I see this pattern frequently. People can analyze their problems, reflect on their past, journal or talk through their problems to try to gain perspective, and sometimes they become very self-aware. But they keep bringing the same kind of thinking to every level of analysis. 

In other words, you change the level of thinking, but not the frame that is doing the thinking. 

To quote Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

The frame you (or others) bring to a situation will always shape what you see in that situation, what you feel about it, what you decide to do, and ultimately what results you get.

If you keep bringing the same way of thinking to every level of reflection and analysis, you’ll find yourself thinking about your problems for years and never actually change them.

The real leverage in life is not just in changing your behavior, your environment, or the situations you find yourself in. The real leverage is in learning how to change the higher levels of perception and meaning that govern how you experience everything in the first place.

To your next level of momentum, meaning, and mastery,

Jason Schneider

PS. If you’re ready to master your perception and learn how to change the frame you are thinking from (not just what you are thinking about), and even to facilitate others to do the same, you may be a good fit for the work we do. We run small group trainings and programs throughout the year and keep the groups intentionally small so our clients develop real skill and get real results. If you’d like to be considered for an upcoming group, you can apply here.