You will experience psychological impasse many times in your life. During these times, you have the sensation that you’re stuck or paralyzed. You’re convinced that something must change, whether in your work or personal life. Though this feeling is normal, you need to move beyond it. Failure to “get unstuck” can put your career and personal life—as well as the healthy functioning of your team or organization—at risk.
In Getting Unstuck, business psychologist and researcher Timothy Butler offers strategies for moving beyond a career or personal-life impasse—by recognizing the state of impasse, awakening your imagination, recognizing patterns of meaning in your life, and taking action for change.
Drawing on a wealth of stories about individuals who have successfully transitioned out of impasses, Getting Unstuck provides a practical, authoritative road map for moving past your immediate impasse—and defining a meaningful path forward.
A mental model can be seen as an accumulation of a lifetime’s learning about what works and what doesn’t. We have a model for our boss’s personality and how she will respond to certain behaviors; a model for things that will go well for a family outing and things that won’t; a model for how to get ahead at work; a model for how to navigate the local traffic flow to get to work on time. The problem with any mental model is that it is always operating on information from the past. In contrast, true vision is never an arrangement or rearrangement of solutions that have worked in previous circumstances, but springs from the immediacy of today.
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