The Necessity of Accepting "Stuckness"

Yesterday I had a very frustrating day – not one which is totally foreign to my experience but with a slightly new and different twist. After enjoying three days of a long holiday weekend, I had set aside most of the day to create/compose/write my presentation for the American Astronautical Society which I am delivering in a couple days at their Imagine 2009 Conference. The day was virtually “wasted”.

Despite my good intentions and a plethora of ideas and angles and insights, I accomplished very little, until...

Early evening I posted the following comment on my Face Book page: “Some days it just seems impossible to be as productive as I know I am capable of being - why do I get "stuck" like this?”

Literally within minutes I had the following responses from several trusted friends and colleagues, including my daughter.

“Sometimes you just have to allow yourself a break. That can be a very good thing. “

“If I knew, my friend, I would share the answer, gladly.”

“It's called creative incubation. we all need it. :) “

“Productive and 'creative' are different things. Perhaps by being productive you mean 'efficient'. For being effective in what you do, if you are a creative person, you need periods like that. The worst you can do then is to try very hard.”

All of the above comments make sense to me intellectually. They were/are appreciated. But there is nothing that tries my patience more than believing that I SHOULD be able to produce right now, even though I am not. I become very self-critical and undermine my best intentions even more.

When it comes to pacing productivity, sometimes the most significant thing we can do or say is simply to acknowledge, “I’m stuck”. When I did that yesterday, everything changed within a very short span of time. I found myself in a new kind of "flow state" within minutes, though I did little or nothing different, other than state to my virtual friends what was obvious to me by the end of the day.

Sometimes THE most productive thing we can do is ease up on ourselves. I wonder how much creativity and innovation is lost because we fail to realize this in a timely way??

Burgeoning Connections Produce Relational Commodities

I’ve been perpetually on the move the last six weeks, travelling widely. Was interviewed by a Croatian TV station after speaking at a leadership conference in Zagreb, supported faculty and taught at the African Leadership Academy in Joburg once again, facilitated a 2.5 day offsite for Merck’s Strategy Office in NJ, met with the VP of RD for Heinz Europe in Amsterdam, spoke yesterday on “Managing Connections to Optimize Innovation” at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs sponsored by the A-L Technical Academy - all exciting and worthwhile!


I have made up-dates in Linkedin, posted comments on Facebook, and even launched some “tweets” into cyberspace. Many engaging conversations and new connections along the way. But, I have not been writing substantially as was my intention, including entries on this blog. What I notice is that yesterday it took only two comments from trusted individuals with whom I have a relationship to draw my attention to both my desire and need to write. They did not scold, chastise, or do anything to “guilt” me. They simply drew me back to my Self.


At Bell Labs I spoke about how connections are fundamentally transactional. When I need a piece of information, a skill, or some advice, I know where to go and how to access it readily. There is an exchange that requires little or no commitment, other than perhaps implied or explicit compensation for value received. A relationship, on the other hand, requires shared values, a measure of mutual commitment, and underlying trust.


Reuters News reported last week on how the business use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media is exploding. “Just last month… an Internet monitoring firm reported that visits to Twitter, the fourth most popular social networking site, increased by 1,170% in September compared to the year-earlier period. “ This "explosion" is re-aligning our attention, producing relational commodities but not relationships.


I want to be “connected”, most of all to myself! Thanks to Barb and Gordon, each of whom, in their own way, reminded me of that yesterday!