By Kel Weinhold

Well, here we are 10 steps into our 52 step journey! And no matter where we go we keep coming back to feeling stuck.

I don’t mean that you aren’t moving forward. I can pretty much guarantee that one of these hacks has gotten you a bit Unstuck (See what I did there?) AND the reality of work in the current hellscape is that we are going to keep getting stuck. Because we are FUCKING TIRED!  But reality exhaustion aside, I want take up a particular flavor of stuck this week. It doesn’t come from laziness or lack of ideas. It’s not the “I don’t feel like writing today” kind of resistance. It’s more intractable than that. You show up, you try, and the work just… won’t move.

If you’ve hit that wall this week, I want to offer a re-frame along the lines of last week’s advice that not all friction is meant to be pushed through: Sometimes stuck is nothing more than feedback. In other words, your stuckness is pointing to a strategy problem, not a motivation problem.

In the early weeks of a project, especially a long-haul work-in-progress, we aim for consistency, and tie our definitions of success to it. And yes, there’s non-perfectionist truth hiding in there somewhere, but consistency without responsiveness will ultimately become sticky icky stuck. Here’s the problem with the whole consistency or fail model. Your project is alive. It changes as you work on it and you change as you work on it. What felt clear in Week 2 might feel misaligned in Week 10, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve learned something new. So when the words won’t come, or the direction feels muddy, or you find yourself circling the same paragraph for the third session in a row, do yourself a favor and step away from the quicksand. Seriously, PAUSE.

Like I said last week, this isn’t about quitting. You are pausing to listen, and to be clear, to find a better question than “Why can’t I finish this?” (Pretty hard to ask or answer without shaming yourself.)

Try one of these instead

• What part of what I am doing right now feels unclear?
• What problem am I solving right in this moment?
• Is there a smaller piece I can work on instead?
• What would make this easier to start?

One of the most important skills you can build in a long-term creative practice is adaptability; the ability to notice when something isn’t working and to adjust without spiraling into self-doubt. Maybe you’ve been trying to write linearly when the piece actually wants to be assembled out of order. Perhaps you’re drafting too polished, too early, and so you’re strangling the messy middle. Maybe you need to step away from producing and spend a week collecting, observing, or outlining instead. Changing strategy isn’t cheating the process, it is part of the process. That doesn’t mean abandoning the work every time it gets hard. It means distinguishing between productive difficulty and misdirected effort. Productive difficulty feels challenging, but there’s movement and even slow movement counts. Misdirected effort feels like spinning your wheels with the same inputs and same outputs but no shift. If you’re in the second camp this week, give yourself permission to pivot.

Here are a few strategies I offer in Unstuck:

• Try a constraint: Write for 15 minutes and stop.
• Try a different entry point: Start in the middle. Start with a question. Start with an image.
• Try changing the medium: Sketch it. Voice-note it. Map it out.
• Try changing the scale: Zoom way in on a single moment, or zoom out to the big picture.

Sometimes, that’s all you need to get unstuck—not more effort, but a different angle.