I'm ready to have a breakthrough I'm ready to help you have a breakthrough why is this feeling that you haven't reached your full potential you know we kind of say we're stuck why is this so common the way life is structured for us today there is a lot of emptiness a lot of what we spend our time doing does not build on the other moments we spend so that we're building towards something that feels meaningful that is Substantial the problem with being stuck is it feels very personal it feels very uncomfortable and it feels like
it's a bit of a mess but it turns out we're all in some respect what is the first step Dr ala to getting unstuck the first one is to hey it's your friend Mel you know every once in a while you need someone to roll on up aside you tap you on the shoulder and remind you that there is so much unta potential inside of you you Know I I don't think you even realize what you're capable of and so I'm going to start off by dedicating this episode to you and to the potential that
is lying dormant inside of you because that's going to end today we're going to tap into that potential and look if you're already at a point in your life you're like I have achieved so much success Mel I surprised myself that's how I feel about myself guess what this conversation still going to Ignite a breakthrough because regardless of what you've accomplished you have not reached what you're capable of yet neither have I or if you're listening right now and you're like oh I feel BL unmotivated and unproductive boy have I been there so many times
in my life I have been so sick of my excuses but I had no idea what to do about it here's the thing after today you are going to know what to do about it because you already know that you have this Extraordinary potential that's why you're frustrated the issue is that you don't know how to unleash it well that's going to change today because one of the world's most respected resar Searchers and professors at NYU is in the house today and you will leave this conversation with a three-step road map that makes leveling up
your life easier than you think Dr Adam Alta welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast thank you for having me I'm ready to have a Breakthrough good I'm ready to help you have a breakthrough okay great so youve just spent all this time researching the anatomy of a breakr and so there's actually a whole process that you can break down for us yeah so you know I think the problem with being stuck is it feels very personal it feels very uncomfortable and it feels like it's a bit of a mess right and that's the way people
describe it when they have it when they feel it but the the whole Point of this book was to say there is a road map and if you follow the steps you will get unstuck it's just the most of us don't know what those steps are that's what the book is designed to do oh where the hell have you been my whole life for crying out loud I want you to start before we get to the road map talking directly to the person who who is listening to this and they're either listening for themselves because
they're going through this moment in life where They're like or just kind of blah or they're feeling stuck or they're listening and someone in their life that they love is really stuck what can they expect to learn from you today and how might their life change based on really learning This research about the anatomy of a breakthrough yeah so the first thing to understand is that getting stuck and being stuck is universal it's part of What it is to be human and that's liberating for a lot of people because it feels like this very personal
affront you don't recognize how many other people around you are stuck but it turns out we're all stuck in some respect that's the first thing to understand the second thing to understand is that there are actually things you can do systematically one after another to get unstuck it may feel like a mess it's complicated it's hard to understand how You can get through it but in many many cases there is a path through and I'm going to try to share some IDE about how we can get from being stuck to making progress to hitting breakthroughs
so Dr ala let's talk about what the word stuck even means yeah so when we throw that word around I feel stuck I am stuck I'm stuck in life I'm stuck in this job as a researcher what do you want us to think about when we hear the word stuck or What it actually means or feels like yeah I think there's the there are two kinds of stuck there's the one kind where you say I want to be at Point Z and I'm in point a and I need to figure out the path from A
to Z that's as short as possible and and the destination is obvious right I've got a goal there's something specific I need to reach it might be a job related goal might be a relationship whatever it is might be like I want to uh get my Nursing degree Or it might be I'm sick of being single like so that's when you have a goal and you feel though a little overwhelmed like why would you be stuck if you know what you want because you haven't been able to get from a to even B so that's
the one I think that often is easier to solve there's the other kind of stuff that's just like blah I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing I things just feel kind of dull and gray and I don't know where I'm supp I might Be your career a relationship a friendship uh life just feels like it's kind of being leeched of all the things that make it really rich and interesting and that's a very sort of diffuse kind of stuckness where it's not attached to one specific thing and that's incredibly common so those are
very different one is I can't complete this goal the other is I don't even know which way to turn to create the next goal and so they're a little bit different but th those both Exist and I'm going to talk about what I think best interventions are there are listeners to this podcast in 194 countries MH and if I had to boil down the kind of universal sentiment on the looking for help or needing inspiration and guidance the complaint of feeling a loss of Direction MH H is is I think one of the biggest things
that people struggle with I think that's right it's it's an incredibly common response that I've had to this Book and to talking about these issues that the way life is structured for us today there is a lot of emptiness and a lot of what we spend our time doing does not build on the other moments we spend so that we're building towards something that feels meaningful that is substantial and I think I think a lot of people feel that there's an emptiness to what we're doing a lot of the time so is that what we're
basically saying if we say we're stuck that we don't have Anything meaningful going on I've been running the survey on thousands of people around the world asking them exactly these questions what does it mean to you to be stuck and are you stuck first thing I'll say is everyone says yes I am stuck in at least one respect and then they can articulate it very quickly they can write to me in the response what they're stuck with and what's affecting them a lot of them it's very narrow you know I I've been trying To learn
this piece on the piano for the last six years and I can't do it and it frustrates me every day and then for other people it's much broader it's like my whole life is one big sticking point like I don't even know where I'm going and each day goes by and I'm like what how was this day building on the day that came before it's a sort of meaninglessness to to life yeah um which is so overwhelming which only makes you feel more lost are there particular Areas in your research that come up over and
over in people's lives where they tend to get stuck a lot of it is um cre creativity based so I think it's hard to be creative you know you're asking a lot of a human being when you say come up with something new or have a good idea and we all assume that that's something we should be able to do and our work often requires that of us and so for a lot of people that's in that domain for a lot of other people it's not Work-based it's about relationships it's about being stuck in a
situation where you have to deal with someone you don't want to deal with or you don't know how to extract yourself from a situation and then for other people it's the broadest kind which is exactly as we've Des Des cribe this I don't even know why I'm stuck I just know that I feel like things aren't the way they should be Dr Alter I take it that based on the research this is something that you're Going to experience over and over and over again during the course of being alive yeah a huge part of it
is accepting the discomfort that comes from being stuck and recognizing that this is universal that everyone is in this position at some point often many points of their lives there's this incredible research talking about how often these things come up for us these major changes in our lives that make everyone feel stuck Bruce fer has done some Research looking at what he calls life Quakes life Quakes are these huge major life events that affect all of us and we're almost always blindsided by them and they're very often not things we want to happen in our
lives like what like uh change in a marital status a divorce uh the death of a loved one illnesses things like that they come up they happen to us and they are Universal it's part of being a human being some of these are really good things by the way But they still force you to change what you're doing what a good one a good one might be like a job promotion or you move to a new town or a new state or a new country and you're excited about it uh maybe a marriage is a
good one having a child could be obviously a huge positive but also it brings complications and change and you've got to figure those out so you can be stuck by a good change too so if your broad philosophy of life is there will be ups And downs and there will be times that are tough then when those times happen you don't spend time saying why me I can't believe this is happen you know there's a whole lot of sort of rumination that go you're just steps ahead so it liberates you to start acting and to
start making the next steps you need to make to get through that that part of life in that moment I love that you know it does make me wonder though Adam the thing that I've noticed about people in my life or when I've been really stuck is that it becomes part of my identity yeah and I argue to stay where I am and so so I would love to have you speak directly to somebody who may be really needing a breakthrough when it comes to relationships yeah or a breakthrough when it comes to their career
or their health and if you're in your own head in the Echo chamber and you're like but it's hard but I've dated all these People but my all my bosses are jerks and you kind of have that story right what would how do you get started in terms of like to even just get over yourself in the way you're standing in your own way yeah there's this really interesting Paradox that when you are stuck the thing you most want is kind of freedom I just want to move I want to like get unstuck yes it
turns out that constraining yourself and having very prescribed steps is really useful so one Process I use with people and with companies as well is a process called a friction udit and a friction audit is a big part of the book friction audit friction audit basally a friction audit you know when you audit if you're an auditor and you go into the books of a company to audit the books you're basically like saying is does this all make sense let me pour through each line of the of the books and make sure I understand it
all and a friction audit Is an attempt to find the friction so what is it that's slowing me down what is it that's not making me move forward or that's stopping me from moving forward there are three steps to a friction audit the first one is to figure out where the friction is and that takes a bit of doing sometimes and even asking the question is a first very important step because when you feel like you've just described my boss is are jerks things just aren't working for Me you're not you're not being thoughtful about
it you just feel things it feels bad so the friction audit basically the process says figure out what the biggest sticking points are they could be you know every day there's a part of the day that I look forward to least makes my life least happy it's the biggest you know downward force on my well-being that's a friction point or I'm trying to get from A to Z in my career and I know that I can never get Past C cuz C in that step that particular step is a major friction point that I can
never get past it might be a particular boss I have to deal with it might be an aspect of my job that I can't kind of refine and improve whatever it is if you do that process of introspecting and finding the friction point you are much better positioned to make Forward Motion because the next step is intervention is there a way that I can either weed out that that friction Point Al together or SM sand It Down Smooth it down and what that means is for a lot of people it means spending a bit of
time energy and sometimes money and saying this thing is such a big problem for me it's such a thorn that I need a way to to eradicate it to remove it and I'm going to throw resources at this problem whatever resources I have and so it depends on the on the context but if you intervene and you remove that that friction point then you're much Better placed to move forward and the third stage is confirmation is just making sure that you've actually done a good job I can share a personal story so I was crazy
stuck probably oh God uh 2019 super super super stuck and things were going fine like on the outside my life looked great uh married long time kids like I finally had gotten to a point where we were making the money and it paid off our bills and you know we can live our life And I was happy in the work that I was doing yeah but not and I felt guilty that I felt stuck like I almost had this this shame about the fact that I had a house I had a marriage intact I had
my health and yet I felt empty and a dear friend of mine Peter Shen who I'm realizing just friction audited me MH we were um I don't even remember where we were but I was griping to him and he's been a huge Mentor and very close friend of mine and he is a renowned business strategist and he said take out a piece of paper and I said okay what the hell is this going to do cuz of course when you're stuck you're kind of a jerk yeah cuz you're in your emotion right and you don't
know how to get out of that stage one in your emotion and he said I want you to write down absolutely everything about your life that creates friction that was his exact word and so I was like what do you Mean by friction and he said that you just feel all this resistance and negative emotion to you you resent it you you're annoyed by it you're frustrated it's hard and so I took out this piece of paper atam and it was like just vomiting on the page I hate packing on a Sunday I hate being
away I hate and just the word hate hate hate hate I hate how much I miss my kids when I'm traveling I hate how much I'm working I hate like a like was just like and the Second that somebody gave me permission to write it down in that language it just flooded out of me it was as if the emotion of stuckness had a place to go yeah and once it was on a piece of paper he basically was like everything on that list is now a project yep you either need to remove it from
your life and work or you need to hire somebody or find somebody to do it or you need to figure out how to do it without Complaining about it and that right there is the road map Mel because all those things that are causing friction are what are keeping you stuck but you're not doing anything about it and so then it became the next side of the page yeah and you say oh these are things I can move these are things I can't so I got to change my attitude about it you accept it you
recognize there's not that much you can do but you've put a label on it and You've said you know what some things just suck and packing on a Sunday is just how it is I got to pack on a Sunday whatever that stuff is all just there there and it's in a box and not everything in life is going to be wonderful and I'm okay with that um I will say as well that when we think about how to improve life yeah you described a whole lot of positives you had a lot of good things
in your life as you were going through this process yes We often think that the way to make life better is to do more good things you know throw in more fun stuff I think there's some truth to that more good things is only better I think the real bang for your buck in life if you want to make life better is to take the lows the ition points the things that are hard and bad and smooth them out or raise them up if you can I think that's where we should spend our time and
attention why because that's where if You have a lot of good things but you have a lot of things that are bad that drag you down they do a much worse job of dragging you down and the good things can do dragging you up we are often as good as the worst stuff that's going on and so if you feel like your life is a series of friction points but you also on paper have all these other good things the best thing you can do is not add more good things it's to take your time
and attention and deal with those Friction points and and often your money and other resources that you have so that's what I would counsel people to to generally do is focus on bringing the lows up a little bit rather than always focusing on the next flashy vacation the next expensive thing that I'm going to buy those things will help a little bit but they're never going to help as much as lifting up the the lows so that they're not quite as low you know again a personal story I have been shocked by How much of
an impact therapy with my husband like so we were going through just a really terrible time probably 4 and A2 years ago and we went into counseling and holy cow it was like a creeper digging up the dead bodies everywhere kind of awful painful thing but on the other side of it I had no idea how incredible the relationship could be yeah and it wouldn't have been had we not hit that really painful moment of feeling stuck And just in a standoff but it is hard to take that step to face the friction I guess
that's what we did we went and sat with a therapist and did a friction audit on each other and on the marriage and it was awful yeah but but the dividends that it pays on your life when you go through something like that it just creates tremendous meaning yeah so do you think part of the issue with the reason why it's so easy to get Stuck is that life just kind of is the same thing over and over again I I think that's part of it I think the other thing about being stuck you just
described it is that when something is a friction point the the natural instinct is to turn away from it yes it's to say I'm going to focus on something else you know I if you having difficulties in your relationship the natural thing is to say well let's just give it a bit of distance you know I just I got to do Some other stuff you know you figure out other areas of your life that are more appealing you throw your attention and time there and that's a mistake because those those friction points they kind of
nag at you they become traps and unless you figure them out and actually deal with them you're not going to be able to raise them up and they can end up being problems for decades and so I think that's a large part of it is is that there's a kind of sameness and a Repetition to life and the repetition comes from ignoring those little things that are niggling that are sort of pulling at your ankle saying hey do you want to look at me and you're like no I don't want to do that there are
some other things I'd rather do instead that are more fun and more appealing and and that's why a friction Ed is so useful because it forces you to pay attention to what's not working which we generally as humans don't have the instinct to do No in fact we not only don't have the instinct to take a sober look at what's not working we have the instinct to turn away from it yeah exactly so if is was there anything in the research about particular periods in Life or ages where you tend to get more stuck yeah
so I have some research with a colleague of mine hell hershfield at UCLA where we I I was I was 29 and I felt like I was about to be 30 this was a number of years ago now I'm I'm much older than That now but at the time I was 29 about to be 30 and I felt like I had to do something just to kind of show myself that I was still just as vibrant as I'd been when I was younger and so on so did you feel stuck I felt stuck in various
ways I felt stuck and how so like the scr put me at the scene I want to meet the 29-year-old Adam you're not where you are yet you don't have like International bestselling books like all this Renown research tell me who Adam at The age of 29 stuck was I had just finished grad school I was just starting a new career I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in the United States still I was missing people in Australia I was single I felt kind of lonely and UN moured in New York City I didn't
really know if I had a place there yet and I just felt globally more blah than anything like things were going well on paper but I just wasn't sure where I was headed and I wanted to do something that kind of Showed me that I had drive and that everything was working well so I I signed up to run a marathon my first marathon my only marathon and I did this at 29 and Hal and I were talking about this and saying we were thinking about the idea that the way we count using this base
10 system who the decade that just we count in tens oh okay so the way we count using tens we think of decades as meaningful right so turning 30 40 50 60 is a big deal in our culture yes There's no inherent reason why 39 to 40 should be different from 35 to 45 uh 35 to 36 but it does feel different and because of that we wanted to investigate whether every 10 years when your age ends into nine and you're thinking about a new decade does that push you to think more deeply about your
life and that's what we found so what you find is there's a little SP in questioning the meaning of life around the nine ending ages it's like a little end of decade Crisis and you see some interesting things happen on the back of that so one of them is more people are likely to sign up for marathons the way I did at the age of ending a nine 29 39 49 59 yeah they're more likely to be interested in things like reading books on Aging you see a little bit of a people are more likely
to buy those kinds of books they become more focused on Aging you also see some negative things if they have a crisis when they Have that that questioning of meaning you see a rise in extramarital Affairs so if you look at the data there's a a rise with nine ending ages for those kinds of Affairs and you even see a small rise in the suicide rate so there are profound things that happen at the end of the decade for people and this is a time when we tend to have these little moments of questioning and
when we feel quite stuck so is that called a temporal Landmark where there's like this sort of Almost marking of time that makes you then a the span of your life yeah I think it's similar to how we do this thing of creating resolutions between December and January it's a it's a moment that just pushes us to think more broadly and abstractly and because of the way we count it happens to be just before those new decades how can you use this research to your advantage so you're kind of Cruising Into the 29th 19th 49th
69th birthday how do you use this to your advantage yeah so there are a few things you can do one thing is to say that there's something very arbitrary about picking those years you know you could be 34 you could be 44 you could be 54 64 and say this is when I want to do this little audit process I don't have to ask myself whether my life's meaningful only once every 10 years and actually doing it more often is better for you than doing it once every 10 Years and having this huge you know
event where it feels overwhelming right so do this often just ask yourself maybe once a year maybe it's your birthday maybe you don't want to do that on your birthday you want to do it on a different day I think it's the perfect day it is that's what I do but other people might don't want to you know have their birthday be about this process but do it once a year hold on I want to push back on that because the single best Thing that you could do as a gift to yourself is to pull
out a blank piece of paper and go where is their friction in my life because what I know based on Adam's research is that if I were to turn my attention to the friction in my life and make it a project to either remove it smooth it out or face the stuff that I do not want to face that I know is in the back of my mind and it bugs me but and it's going to bite me in the rear end someday if you did this Because here's the thing I'm thinking about this list
that I did with Pete I do it every year yeah my business my life very different right now than it was even like six months ago and so I think this is like the greatest thing you could do for yourself is to wake up to where are those places in your life where there's like it's almost like stuck is this signal and this flag from your internal like navigation GPS going ding ding ding ding ding yeah turn Toward this yeah I mean you could do it on your birthday absolutely I think for some people it's
a kind of overwhelming moment and so they don't want to do it on their birthday if they prefer not to but I'm totally fine with it being on a birthday the one thing about doing it consistently every year is the list should change if you're doing a good job of intervening then that's a moment of confirmation when you can say hey look there were these things that two or Three years ago I was writing down I kind of fixed them I figured out a way past them that is incredibly reaffirming it's the opposite of feeling
stuck it's feeling that you've got Forward Motion so there's Great Value in doing that more regularly the other thing is if it does happen naturally when you're 39 49 59 that's okay the research suggests that to make meaning and to deal with these moments in a way that's productive you can do a few things one is to set Yourself a goal which is why running a marathon or an ultra or a try or whatever that's a good goal because it's an extended goal it's very defined it has steps that get you closer to the goal
that's very reaffirming it's also about connecting with people so one way we get meaning in our lives is to feel a sense of community to feel a deep sense of connection with other people and so if you can do that if you can make sure that you you reach out to all your Friends that you've been meaning to reach out to that will also be very productive on those those times when you're questioning the meaning of life okay so doc I'm going to play the role please of the stuck family member mhm and I have
been in a string of jobs that just blew and I've been through a breakup and my life is boring and is kind of how I feel how the hell is running a marathon or setting a goal Going to change my life so the the thing itself is not that's not the issue it's not that you've run a marathon and suddenly you're going to become a person who makes all their money and spends all their time running okay that's not what it's about it's about demonstrating to yourself through the way you're behaving certain things about who
you are that your life has a kind of purpose and that you're the kind of person who can seize an opportunity to approach a goal and to Reach a goal and to succeed there's something tremendously valuable about signaling that especially when you feel globally stuck so it doesn't actually matter what the goal is it's not the goal for goal sake it's the fact that you are moving towards something that says I have achieved I have done this thing so that's what the value of say a marathon is it's not for everyone but for some people
it's very useful it was very good for me it did make me feel Much better about where I was what are some examples of things that you found in your research that people would pick as a goal to Signal something else like that I'm moving forward I'm not going to be defined by this stuckness like the fact that I can say I'm going back to school or I'm losing weight like whatever like you know if I'm playing the disgruntled family member because I think you feel so mhm that there's so much resistance to even first
the belief That it's going to change yeah and also resistance to moving yourself in a different direction I mean you're up against inertia we're talking physics here so do you have examples of other goals that you've seen in your research or just even in the interviews that you've done for the book that really have helped people yeah and these things because it's not about the thing itself it's just what it signals they're kind of like pallet cleansers that get you Ready to do the thing that actually needs to be done so for a lot of
people that's a very valuable step the things are often of one of three types there are uh athletic Pursuits so something like running a marathon running a try whatever it is and that has the benefit of often getting you moving which has its own benefits that are separate from all of this second kind is intellectual I want to learn a language I want to learn a new skill I want to learn to Code it doesn't matter what it is but it's something that's important to you it can be directly relevant to your job so it
might actually push you for but it could just be like I don't know how to do crosswords I want to get to the point where I can do the Saturday crossword in the New York Times and then you do that whatever and then the Third Kind is creativity based I want to paint a picture I want to create a piece of music I want to create a film I want to Take photos doesn't matter what it is but I want to get better at a particular skill that matters to me all of those are very
valuable in showing you that you can have forward motion that you can make movements towards a goal it doesn't matter everyone has their own preference about which one works but they all seem to work pretty well I can give you a bunch of examples from my family so my husband Chris has completed that online fitness challenge 75 hard four times now My daughter's done it twice both times they committed to doing it simply to shake up their life and tap into their potential here's another one so just yesterday my husband got up at 6:00 in
the morning to go to a national park Service website so he could reserve a campsite for 6 months from now to the date and believe it or not by the time he logged on to the website at 6 o'clock in the morning his top two choices were already reserved he got his third choice For a a campsite up at the national park so that our family can climb Mount Kaden now here's what's cool about that we're not doing it yet it's just something that we have put out into the future we made it a goal
over the holidays that our family wanted to do that this year as a family and Chris marked his calendar four months ago that this was the date he needed to log on yesterday he logged on at 6 o'clock in the morning he got the campsite these Are all small steps forward towards something out in the future that is deeply meaningful to us that really keeps you feeling like you're tapping into the bigger potential of your life yeah and I want to see if I can't um really make sure that for you as you're listening whether
you're listening for yourself or somebody that loves you who's a pain in your rear end sent you this episode because they think that you're stuck and they want to see you Moving in the right direction and happy and vibrant and no more friction in your life I want to make sure that you really get the power of what he is telling you because I think when you are are stuck in your life it's like being lost and when you're lost and your GPS is not connected you get that spinning sensation where it's like waiting to
reconnect waiting to reconnect so you don't know where to go yeah and so I think about the goal listening keenly to You as if you saying I'm going to climb uh Kaden in Maine or Mount kilamanjaro that's my goal or I am going to learn how to play the piano and I am going to even dare my friends and bet money that I'm going to play at the local coffee shop in a year or I'm going to learn Spanish or I am going to uh learn more about Ai and get this skill for work like
when you do that it's as if that internal GPS reconnects yeah and all of a sudden you have put a destination Point out in the future which the destination doesn't freaking matter what matters is that that destination signals it's time to stop spinning move in the direction start getting in shape to go up Kaden register your rear end for the AA the AI class take up the painting course when you start moving toward it it's like the road trip to A New U is begun and it's that sort of New Direction piece that must be
changing something is that why this works exactly Yeah and so as you go through a friction audit you list all the points of friction the other thing to list is what are all the things in my life I I'd like to be able to do that I can't do now that's what you start picking from when you do this because it signals not just that you're getting friction out of the way which is really external to you it's like saying this thing is outside of me I want to move it away and forward motion this
is something much more Personal I'm the kind of person who can take on a goal and achieve it whatever the goal is it's something that's on my bucket list and when you do that then you are prepared to move forward with the thing that perhaps really matters to you in that moment you know what's also fascinating about this research is it confirms something that I have certainly felt when I've been stuck in my life or my marriage or my job or with my body and my health is that you feel like a Victim yeah and
the act of setting a goal and then starting to work toward it it proves that you're not a victim why is it so critical to have something meaningful that you're working on in your life it's exactly as You' as you've described because we we spend a lot of time asking ourselves what kind of person am I and it's very disempowering to be stuck right you feel like you are not the best version of you whether it's a particular stuckness I'm Trying to do this very narrow goal and I can't do it whether it's I just
feel kind of blah and I'm not making forward progress either way you're not looking at yourself in that moment saying I'm an efficacious person who can get stuff done you know docious mean I make things happen got it I have efficacy I can make things the outcomes that matter to me happen that's not how you feel in that moment you feel kind of disempowered and Powerless and Not very good and so the thing about creating a goal that's maybe meaningful to you it's on a bucket list and succeeding is that it tells you that you
are actually someone who can get stuff done it it counteracts and contradicts that feeling of helplessness and once you know that about yourself you are in a much better position to try something tackle something that's really big and meaningful that's maybe been a sticking point sometimes for months or years Rather than being in a position where you're like I feel terrible now I'm going to just try this thing that's really overwhelming you're not in the best position to do that in that moment of of powerlessness um you know I have this interesting question that I
want to ask you and I don't know if you researched this but given that so many of us are going to share this episode with somebody that we love yeah when you're the person that's stuck And it feels like everyone around you is trying to change you or pressure you to change or help you get out of that rut is your own almost like fear to admitting that they're right also a big barrier like I'm thinking about like if you have somebody in your family that's drinking too much or that has really let their health
or their weight go yeah and admitting that it's a goal to deal with this also means admitting that other People are right did you see any of that sort of social pressure aspect to why people also stay stuck yeah so I I really firmly believe that you can't make people care about a goal or an outcome you can't say to someone you're stuck and you have to care about getting unstuck that's really got to come from the person you can guide them there you can show them why it's important you can have them introspect about
it to the point where they say you know what I'm Now seeing the light I understand why it's so important to do this but you can't bully people into saying this thing that's sticking me is a problem and I need to do something about it so I think the best thing you can do as a as a loved one as a friend as a family member is is to make it without being judgmental is to make it as clear as possible why this thing matters and and kind of gently guide this person along in that
direction show them that it Matters and have them answer some questions about it that's the best thing you can do is ask questions do you want this thing to change do you think it could be better the the friction audit is a great example of this because it's it means it's not about them it's not confronting it's you just say hey this is not about you but tell me all the things that kind of annoying to you right now like what's what's a friction point and by pouring out all of those Things onto the page
you then have something you can latch on to and at least say hey this seems like it's an issue for you let's work on it together rather than telling them here's your problem we're going to fix it together which often leads people to push back you do a lot of work with companies so how does this work apply if you feel like you're on a team and the team's stuck yeah so I mean it it's that's originally where I started Doing this work was with companies it wasn't with individuals but it was the same idea
that companies either in the way they interact with customers or internally in their operations have sticking points you know every company no matter whe whether it's big or small even more if it's big will have this series of bottlenecks and sticking points and red tape and bureaucracy they need to deal with and so this is an attempt to figure out where those points Are it's also when you're dealing with customers a lot of my work is on consumer behavior and human judgment and decision- making humans don't like stuff that's hard and if you are losing
people in a sort of funnel in in your interactions with them in a sales funnel moving towards making a particular sale all of those points where you lose them you can almost always put it down to friction like you're asking them to do an extra thing an extra click on a Website go to an extra page make a phone call make a text send an email and so I work a lot with companies to say let's figure out where those friction points are and and see if we can track what sort of effect it has
when we remove those from the process can you speak directly to somebody who feels stuck they want to change jobs yeah they want to put themselves out there again after a breakup they want to really go after their Financial Security But they're scared like they're scared that if they they won't find the job they're scared that they're going to just meet somebody else that breaks their heart could you just talk a little bit about what the research says about why it's so important to do it anyway yeah so the one thing we haven't really talked
about is the third section of the book which is habit it's actually doing something it's acting the single best thing you can do if you feel stuck is to Take a minimally viable action in other words the smallest possible action that moves you in the right direction try to think of what that tiny little action would be it might be if you're in a job you don't like it might be just learning what the alternatives are making a list of alternative job options alternative Industries you might want to work in maybe go even to the
point of making a list of specific companes that are your goal Companies and and then you can go through the sort of pros and cons exercise of figuring out what are the strengths and weaknesses of each one but even that small act doing something moving in the right direction is enough to signal that you've got forward progress and then you can do the bigger stuff later on but getting the ball rolling is the biggest trick it's doing the small things so that you're not static you're actually moving in the Right direction why is that important
it's important in part because you're signaling to yourself that you are the kind of person again who can move the same issue comes up again but also because uh moving from zero to any action is really really important in getting the big action to happen you have to do that step anyway and once you start doing it you're more likely to do more um there's this classic story of um Jeff Tweety the front man of the band Wilco who talks about how when he's trying to come up with creative ideas it's incredibly difficult and so
what he does is this minimally viable action he says to himself when I wake up in the morning and I don't want to be creative he writes books and he writes music sometimes he doesn't want to do either one he says to himself I'm going to spend 10 minutes coming up with the worst sentences I can writing the worst Most boring music I can because what he's doing is he's lowering the bar all the way to the ground and saying I'm going to be non-judgmental I just need to do something and that has two effects
one thing is again it gets the ball rolling and so when he's trying to do good writing it's more more likely to happen but the other thing it does is um it's sometimes means that the things you think are not good in those moments actually turn out to be better than you Think they actually are more important than you think and that process of being non-judgmental and just letting little things happen and not saying it has to be perfect is a very useful way of moving forward um I love this 10-minute rule yeah and I
also love assume it's going to be the worst because you've lowered the bar bar do you have other quick examples cuz I know the person listening is going to be like okay so what's an example in a job what's an Example with the relationship what is the minimal viable action that you could take just to get somebody thinking cuz based on the research without doing this you're going to stay stuck this is step three yeah exactly so this is the thing is is the the smallest action is the good one uh one thing I really
like that I find very valuable and this what got me unstuck when I was doing a degree I didn't want to do was experimentation figure out the list of options and then Start working through them compare them to each other you will never know what is the right option if you don't know what the set looks like and you have and tasted a little bit of each one so set up that array and then spend a week on each one and line it up and do that and maybe that itself won't get you moving forward
much but it will teach you what you do like and what you don't like what does work and what doesn't work and that's a great minimally viable action Is to say I'm going to treat at least this part of my life like a long experiment and then once I figure out the best thing for then I can be single-minded and focused on exploiting that one opportunity that one thing that's all I'm going to do but you can't make Forward Motion until you know what that thing is okay I want to make sure I translate that
cuz that was genius so basically let's just say your goal is to start working out and if you take on the Mindset of being curious and don't turn it into I'm getting six-pack abs and I'm exercising seven days a week create a experiment of curiosity I'm going to spend the next month figuring out what kind of works outs I even like and I'm only going to spend 10 minutes every other day I'm going to try jump broking I'm going to try Pilates I'm going to try a hit class and if you turn it into an
experiment this is no longer about getting it right it's about getting Yourself moving yeah and you know that when you do an experiment some conditions are going to be bad some things will be better than others and that's good you've learned what does work and what doesn't work and actually you appreciate what works more when you've seen and tasted what doesn't I'll give you an example this podcast is something that I thought about for probably seven years and it haunted me you want to talk about stuck and feeling Like you're not tapping into your potential
there's this thing you want to do and you're not doing it you're not doing it I was fully in that mode of the emotion around it the excuses around it and it really made me miserable and it also showed up by the way when I did that friction list and so if I think back it probably would have been three or more years ago I made one of those friction lists which I do all the time now and right on it was I haven't Started the podcast yet so the fact that it showed up on
the list meant to me that this was an area of my life an area of potential that I needed to do something about and I didn't start the podcast that day I made a decision that I was going to start working on it in your words I turned it into an experiment and you know it's interesting to point out I think it's really important for you as you listen and or a fan of this podcast to know that I Didn't even really quote do anything for a year I would wake up every day and I
would take 15 minutes of action a day and the first day the action was I made a decision I was going to launch a podcast in a year or two the next day I simply made a list of podcasts I was going to listen to that's it the next day I listened to a podcast for a little bit of time the next day I did a Google Search and I learned about the kind of equipment that people use for podcasts That and it just went on and on and on for entire year I would say
that I was so busy almost doing a research project and becoming a student of the thing that I was interested in before I even did any of the actual steps of I guess recording an episode or figuring out uh what the audio editing software was and simply researching podcasts simply becoming a student on of it every single day when I did something knowing that it was leading toward this bigger thing it Got me moving I didn't feel stuck again and that was years before the podcast actually launched that's a great minimally viable action so tell
us about the role of failure because everyone's so terrified of failing at this how do you reframe the way you think about failure to help yourself get unstuck and be successful yeah so very few failures are the be all and end all you know it's all about Framing and how you think about a failure very few Failures mean you can never do this thing again usually they open up other options opportunities a second and attempted the same thing and so the first thing is to accept that and to recognize that failure is inevitable it's going
to happen as you get better as you challenge yourself but usually that's not irrevocable it's not the end of the world you can move forward so that's I think the first very useful thing the other thing is to figure out What to take away from that failure so there there are good failures and bad failures bad failure is where you fail you have no idea why and it doesn't help you move forward and you feel dejected you don't feel good about it good failure is saying I've learned something here is what I've learned this part
of what I did actually worked quite well here is where I got close here's where I where I fell short it may even be a case of learning through that failure that This is not something you should be doing and you can quit you can move on to something else there's nothing wrong with doing that there are a billion things we could be doing with our time and if failure is teaching you something about what you shouldn't be doing that's also valuable so essentially the question that differentiates good failure from Bad failure is have I
learned what the next thing should be from this failure and if the answer is Yes then it's good it it helps you it wasn't a failure at all it wasn't a failure I love that Dr Alter so I have another question for you who should you talk to when you feel stuck there are essentially three kinds of people that are very useful when you're trying to get unstuck the first kind are people who are like you who overlap with you similar background similar ideas they kind of get where you're coming from got it so organizations
when they put teams Together will often do this they'll sort of knit together people who are similar the second kind of person is someone who is completely different or non-redundant so I see this happen when companies come to NYU to recruit a lot of the best companies will come in and say we we don't just want you know we're a we're an organization that focuses on say investing we don't just want the best Finance students we want the best two Finance students the two marketing Students the two French literature students the two organic chemistry students
because they'll all have a very different idea about the world and when you put those different IDE ideas together you get something very useful so when when we're often stuck we consult with people who are who are like us and that often further entrenches us yes there's something very valuable in going out and speaking to people who are deliberately quite different from you Yes and then the third kind of person is the black sheep someone who actively pushes back against you so most of us can think about people in our Lives who sort of consistently
see things not just differently but actually in opposition they push us a little bit to sort of challenge the way we see the world um and so Pixar has done this for a while where when they have a team of people working on a film they will bring in a Black Sheep so they might have a whole Lot of people who say the most important thing is our animation that's what sets us apart but they'll bring in someone who says animation doesn't matter essentially it's all about narrative let's make sure that that first scene in
the movie Up is the best narrative we can write because if you don't grip people early then we're never going to get them right so these three kinds of people you should everyone should have essentially a Brain Trust so once you Feel like you're stuck you go to the people who get you they really know you they are a lot like you you go to the people who are a bit different they have different backgrounds and ideas and then you go to the people who really push back on you and you are much more likely
to succeed in making progress with the influence of those three kinds of people you know and if I were to translate that to the personal life yeah right so it makes perfect sense if you're Trying to have a creative breakthrough or a breakthrough in your business or a breakthrough in the way that you're approaching a project if you were to translate that to the personal life I'm sitting here here thinking I'm like okay I got my high school friends and they're kind of like me I got maybe the college friends or the work friends there's
some diversity there in terms of how people think and problem solving backgrounds and then I got to find that one outlier That just looks at life differently yeah to bounce this off of if the person listening were to just do one thing like what is the most important thing that you want them to remember and put into action from this conversation Dr Alter there are two things that you can do two ways of approaching life there are two ways of approaching a sticking point the first one is called exploration where you try different things the
second one is exploitation where you drill really Deep into one thing you cannot do both at the same time you can't both be exploring all your options and really doing as much as you can to make one particular option work for you figure out which stage you're in and then bounce between the two so try different things figure out which one is best drill down on that until you hit a wall and then go back to exploring again and bounce between those two phases and you will effectively get Unstuck thank you thank you thank you
for being here thank you for having me thank you thank you thank you and I also want to thank you for listening today and for sharing this with people that you love because what a waste it would be to go through your life and not tap into the potential inside of you and I know that based on what you learn today you have a road map to help you do that and so I hope you take everything that you learned and you put it into action And one more thing in case no one else tells
you today let me be the one to say I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to change your life and now you don't have any excuses because you have the three simple steps based on the research to plant a signal out into the future and wake up every day and start chipping away at it okay so go do it I know that you're like okay what next what next next what next well first thank you for subscribing it Really means a lot to me and it's one way that
you can give back to me uh it helps us bring you worldclass experts at zero cost second thank you for sharing this because one way that you make your life better is by supporting people around you with information that can Empower them to change your lives and third I know you want more incredible advice from experts that are just extraordinary so check out this episode next
