I spoke with someone recently who was *really* stuck. I’ll call him Joe. Joe was not just stuck professionally, but with his relationship (on again off again) and with his work (not sure if he should change careers or Not just professionally.

When some people get stuck.. they get really… really… stuck. They find that multiple areas of their life start to feel stagnant. They can’t choose where to live. They can’t decide if they should quit their job or leave a relationship. They seem to be caught oscillating between these decisions, never moving forward.

The good news is that if you can start to make progress in one area, you can start to make progress in many. All it takes is a little momentum, and suddenly the damn will burst. If you aren’t feeling like you’re making progress, the good news is the worse it gets, the more likely that it will get painful enough to break the tension.

Tension is what you feel when you get pulled forward and backward or left and right with no progress.

The trick that’s being played on you is that you think it’s about deciding. Being so focused on a decision, such as “Should I quit my job or not?” Or “Should we break up or not?” Is actually the wrong focus. It’s not the decision that is the problem, it’s something deeper which is preventing you from trusting yourself and hearing yourself enough to make natural decisions that move your life forward without so much effort, thinking, overplaying, and pain.

What we’re really talking about here is our energy, and whether or not it is flowing or whether or not it is trapped and stagnant. We stop our own energy from flowing, and that keeps us stuck.

The trick to breaking the damn is to get your energy flowing again, and that involves trust. Trust is needed to move forward, because decisions we feel are important require us to take a leap into something unknown. No matter how much you want to predict your future, or how much you think you can even project the future, you can’t. Ultimately it takes a leap of faith to move forward.

The good news is you can start small. You can domino small decisions into larger ones. What’s one thing that has been put off due to your inability to decide or take action? What’s one small thing you can clear from your backlog?

A client of mine, a CEO of a $30M+ company, he realized that he was prone to letting his metaphorical “Desk” get messy. It was so messy with so many problems and decisions and moments of not saying how he truly felt that it was covered with so much it was hard to work.

The trick was to start clearing his desk. One thing at a time until he finally started to get some space again. Then, in the future, it was about being proactive enough to clear things before they became a problem for him.

Your energy unlocks when you let tiny decisions compound into bigger ones, and when you let your energy flow instead of stopping it by trying to predict and protect yourself from the unknown.