No matter how good things are, there's a moment when things just don't go your way.
That's when you've entered a stall. It doesn't matter how skilled or experienced you happen to be. It's still a place that you can't pull out from.Yet, we all do. And there's a way to speed things up.
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Re-release: Why We Stall – And How To Pull Out Of The Mess
Original: Why We Stall – And How To Pull Out Of The Mess
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
In November of 2014, we started this podcast.
And if you take an average of about 50 episodes a year, that's close to 400 episodes. 400 episodes without a glitch I might add. And then there was one glitch we missed one episode. And then a second episode.
What was really happening? How come there was this factor of stalling. In today's episode we'll talk about stalling. And the stage is that we go through every time we end up with a stall.
As every stall isn't one event, in fact, it is a cascade of events.
One thing happens in the second and third or fourth, and suddenly you're in the trap and you don't know how to get out of it. So while I will cover three points in every episode, today I'm just going to talk about stolen and the way it happened to me.
Just a few months ago I was in a very happy mood. You could say I was overconfident in a way. And there was a reason for this sense of overconfidence.
When I started out the podcast in November of 2016, writing the podcast was always a struggle. I'd have to think of topics on Monday, then start to write a bit on Tuesday, Wednesday, record it, edit it, put music together.
And by Saturday morning, which is when the podcast will go out, it was just so draining. Because all of this stuff had to be done on a continuous basis because I'd finish it off, Sunday will come along and then back to Monday again.
Now, at that point I'd been writing articles about eight her words and scripting for the podcast was close to 3,000 words, sometimes 2,000 by mostly 3,000 and it just drove me nuts for how long, not for a few weeks or a few months, but for almost two years.
Once I crossed that two-year limit and this is arbitrary, it's not like it'll happen to you in two years. It just happened for me in two years. And once I crossed that two-year limit, I could turn out 2000-3,000-wet articles on an ongoing basis.
But first you're not sure of yourself.
Maybe it's just a fluke and maybe things will change. But the third year passed the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and here we are in I8 here. And I was feeling superbly confident.
It didn't matter what kind of week was thrown at me. I was going to do the podcast. And that's when I made my first mistake. And this is a mistake that all of us make, whether we're drawing a cartoon, where we're cooking dish or we're writing a script for a podcast and that is we stop doing the preparation.
If you want to find the genesis of a stall it goes back to preparation.
Until that slow down moment I had been doing just fine.I started with some topics. I do a little bit on Monday a little bit on Tuesday but I had several topics going so I never really ran out of ideas.
There was no pressure on me to do anything other than just go through that on a Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and I'd have several scripts for podcasts all line up in a row.
At one point I had podcasts recorded for three months in a row.
The whole aspect of preparation is just this factor of a deadline. And we also have this deadline before the pandemic, where we work for 12 weeks, and then we take a month off, which meant that we had to have at least four podcasts for the month away, and then at least two or three just as a buffer.
So there's always six seven podcasts ahead, or at least six or seven scripts ahead, so that I could record those podcasts. And then we were at home all the time, not going anywhere.
And this is where the problem began. And you don't always see the problem as it's unfolding. It took one year of the pandemic, two years of the pandemic, and then few months ago, it began to stall.
I stopped writing topics, I stopped reading the information that helped me, that motivated me to create a new content. And you can see how this starts to unfold.
So when we look at a stalling factor, we always look at it somewhere in the middle towards the end when the stall is in full flow. But really, the stalling starts with the preparation stage.
And you know what's happening because it's happening to you in slow motion. You can see it happening. You don't have anything prepared. It's like deciding to cook a meal at about 5.30pm on a weekday. And you have no ingredients and you have no idea what recipe.
And then what are you going to do. You decide to go all for takeaways or you decide to go out. And this is the problem with preparation – we are not prepared, that's the first stage of the stall.
But what happens next is even more scary. What happens next is when you start to bounce. This excess of the second stage of stalling, which is bouncing.
So what is bouncing?
At first, especially when it comes to broadcasting, I come with the topic and then I decide oh no no wait a second that topic is not good enough.
I need to look for a second topic and then the third topic and the fourth topic and this is true for pretty much anything even if you're going out to eat you go okay let's have a Malaysian no let's have Indian let's have Japanese at this one in time when I mean that kind of situation or that state Renuka will stop me and go I'm gonna make a decision.
Because she knows that's not gonna be a resolution, that's just gonna be more and more balanced. And when it comes to writing a script or doing a podcast, there is no renooper to help me.
And so if I go through the process of the rounds all by myself, I will pick one topic that another topic that a third topic.
And then I don't have enough stories for that topic or I don't like the story eventually what I'm going through is the second stage which is just reaching for everything and when you reach for everything of course you reach for nothing so what we have are two elements of the stall quite well in progress.
The first is the lack of preparation then suddenly there is over preparation or rather not able to hold onto anything because everything seems nice or everything seems terrible.
At this point something weird happens and it's what people call the universe sending you a sign.
Approximately two weeks ago I got a cold and then I had a cough and that just spiraled to the point where I was at home for the whole week working from home of course but still at home and then was not that keen to get to the office in the second week.
And the cough wouldn't go away. I'd be coughing in the morning if you'd be coughing at night, I'd be coughing in the middle of the night is the universe sending me a sign.
No, of course not. The universe is not sitting there. There's no desk out there where they go, oh, send a sign to show and send a sign to Carol, send a sign to, no, there is nobody there.
Nothing that sends you signs. With your in such an advanced state of this stall that the way you look at it is Wait a second, I'm supposed to take a break.
I'm supposed to do this. I have already done eight years of podcast back to back surely. I'm entitled to a break. And so one week becomes the second week, could easily become three weeks, four weeks, and then everything comes so close.
Even if you believe in signs and even if you believe that the universe sends you signs, well, the only sign you're going to need is that you have to get up and get going.
And that is probably the best way to undo that stall, which is what I'm doing here live in front of you on this podcast. The way to get rid of the stall is to talk about the problem that you're having.
When we're doing an article writing course for example, clients will sometimes stall and then they have no topics, they have no preparation, they don't know what to do, they think they're not supposed to be article writers, not true.
Same thing with cartooning, people start off believing that they can draw a straight line in six, seven weeks, they're drawing exceptionally well.
But then they also stole, again, it's preparation, chaos, universe, sending signs, doing all that kind of stuff.
And then they start to stole. The point is that you want to talk about right about, draw about your stole.
And when you do that, what you end up doing is not talking about something new. I'm not telling you anything that you don't know already. So what it does, it gets you out of that mess.
It gets you to talk about it. And you get a little check mark. Your podcast is done, your drawing is done, your article is done. Yes, it's about something that's been covered before, but people still need to hear it.
People still want to hear it. They still want to read about it. They still want to see your drawing. They still want you to cook that dish. And though it's not the best that you've done.
And that's how you get out of the stall.
So you start off the stall, and we're summarizing here, you start off the stall with this factor of unpreparedness, you don't do enough stuff, and you don't have enough ingredients in place.
And of course, that's the first stage of the stall. The second stage is when you're grabbing it everything. You want to eat Malaysian food, French food, Italian food, German food, all the touch of food.
You can't even make up your mind what to cook, let alone what to go out and eat. It's just bounce. We do this with our articles. I'll choose this article.
Everything seems terrible. Everything seems great at the same time. At which point we're hoping that something will happen, that the universe will send us sign and unfortunately no one's taken up their post.
So there's no sign coming. But then we look at the bad stuff that happens, maybe you get ill, maybe you have to take a break, whatever, and then we allocate that sign as oh wait a second, this was supposed to happen.
And no, you're just going deeper into that stall. And the only way out of it that I know off is to talk about the stall because there is nothing to bounce around there.
It is a confession. I'm in this mess. This is how I got into the mess. This is how I'm going to get out of the mess. And so that's the podcast for today. We're back on track and hopefully there's no more stalling.
What's next: Do you suffer from the curse of perfection?
Read or listen to: The “Coats Of Paint” System To Break Out Of The Curse Of Perfection
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