Are You Stuck? - How To Escape From Circular Thinking

Do you ever get so caught up in thinking that you can't make real progress? Whichever way you turn, there seem to be obstacles and, in the end, thinking leads back to where you started.

It reminds me of a visit to London where I travelled on the Circle Line. This provides the slightly bizarre travel option of riding through all 27 stations and ending up where you began.

More sensibly, I went clockwise half-way round to St James Park. The service was both regular and frequent. On the return journey, rather than retracing my steps, I decided to continue clockwise and complete the other half of the Circle.

As I waited, I got more and more frustrated that every train that came along was not a Circle service. How could this be? I assumed that trains on the Circle simply ran round and round and therefore would be equally frequent at any point. It was this assumption that was to prove wrong.

When I finally got a train to carry me on, everything went fine until I got to the station just before my destination. There the train waited much longer than usual before it was announced that it was being reversed and heading back the way it had come!

Now I had the answer to my conundrum (reversing trains means that frequency can be varied over sections of the route). The bigger point is that it had been my assumption that had limited my understanding of the true picture.

Assumptions can take you round and round and leave you where you started. To break out of circular thinking, we need real alternatives to our assumptions. The question is how can we find useful alternatives?

One of the best ways I've come across is from the work of Byron Katie. Part of her method is to find alternatives by using 'turnarounds'. It works like this.

1. State your original assumption, for example -

"Pat is a difficult team member"

2. Turn the statement around by making it say the opposite -

"Pat is not a difficult team member"

3. Turn the original statement around by switching subject and object -

"The team is difficult for Pat"

4. Turn the original statement around by making yourself the object -

"Pat is difficult for me"

5. Turn the previous statement around by making yourself the subject -

"I am difficult for Pat"

Altogether, this gives you four different turnarounds (there can be more) - each a variant on the original assumption. Then you can try out each one; some turnarounds will be more useful than others (You may get a sense of this straightaway as you read each one).

You can test the usefulness of each turnaround by changing it into a question; simply add 'What if ...?' to the front. Your answer will guide you towards what you can do (action) to move the situation forward. The clearer the action is to you, the more useful the turnaround is because you are no longer stuck in thinking.

For example, you can take the turnaround "The team is difficult for Pat" and convert it into the question "What if the team is difficult for Pat?" Your answer will guide the action you take - likely to be quite different from that based on the original assumption that "Pat is a difficult team member".

Turnarounds are quick and applicable to any situation - a great way of breaking out of circles!