Get Moving With Ridiculous Thoughts
When you can’t break out of a bad pattern or you’re feeling stuck and frustrated, the best approach can be to force yourself to look at it from a radically different perspective.
Authors who can’t find their way out of a scene in a story will sometimes ask a friend what they’d do in that situation, knowing that the friend’s perspective will be different than their own. If no friend is handy, they might think of the most ridiculous ideas to break their stuck pattern—like putting peanut butter in the gas tank, or having the dog play the piano.
A Little League coach used this principle when he was teaching his team of 7-year-old players how to bat. After watching meek results a few times around, the coach picked up the ball, held it out to his team, and said, “This is not a baseball. It’s a tomato. And the next time you see it coming at you, I want you to smash it with your bat. Smash the tomato!” The boy took a bat, and smashed the “tomato” into the outfield. The other players quickly followed his example, all with big grins on their faces.
Next time you’re stuck in a holding pattern, try thinking of it in radically, even ridiculously different terms.
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