Bridging the Gap between ‘Understanding and Action: Overcoming Inertia’
In this blog I would like to share how one can break free from the chains that hold us back from getting into action, through real case strategies that have worked.
A few of my clients despite being evolved personalities and big-time achievers, shared with me their inability to convert some of their knowledge into action. And this was becoming a bottleneck for their next big step forward.
We all at some point of our lives, experiencethis overwhelming frustration of understanding a concept so clearly in our minds, yet feeling paralyzed when it comes to taking the appropriate action. It could be something important like moving towards a goal, or something trivial like getting angry and losing self-control.
This phenomenon is known as ‘Cognitive Inertia’. It is akin to a boulder resting on the ground and not moving – having static inertia.
The root cause for this ‘CognitiveInertia’most commonlyis -a Fear or Self Doubt in that context. This fear or doubt could have emanated due to watching someone else fail, or a traumatic experience in the past, or even a book or a movie deeply impacting the individual’s mind. It could also be a uniqueexperience creating this fear or self-doubt in our journey.
While it’s a challenge to correctly identify the linkages that are causing this fear or self-doubt,both at the conscious and subconscious levels, coaching conversations and NLP tools including Time-Linestudy help to identify the reasons quite effectively. Just in a few sessions the clients move forward as their fears and self-doubts get addressed with the related therapies.
Though in some cases, this is not enough. While the root cause is addressed still the clients feel stuck. This is very similar to the situation where the ropes holding the boulder are cut but the boulder still doesn’t move. While the past has been sorted, the future may still be unclear. In such cases it becomes important to extend the timeline and help create an attractive future – or as we say a compelling future. The human mind needs to be attracted to something strong to break the cognitive inertia.
And then converting this goal into a realistic plan, with small achievable steps you start to buildmomentum and gain traction. Embracing imperfection, creating a supportive eco system, establishing a routine and most importantly celebrating success at every milestone – has ensured long term success for the clients.
