Blog & Insight

Why Doing Nothing is a Valuable Strategy For Achieving Your Goal

If you're tired, overwhelmed or stressed and think the answer is more doing how might doing nothing be the perfect antidote and enable you to achieve your goal more quickly in the long run?

In the Transformation Game, a creative tool I use in my coaching, there's a few squares on the board where you have a number of options about what to do next - and one of them is always to do nothing. It was certainly an insight on a recent transformation game I played and applied to a specific goal I had.

There's so many reasons why doing nothing is a GREAT idea:

Your mind, body or soul is tired and needs a rest.
You're feeling overwhelmed or stressed (because when we're feeling these we don't have access to our higher cognitive functioning and therefore not be able to make accurate decisions) - Willow in the picture above is doing just that she's only been here 2 weeks and is doing nothing other than sit under the bed when I'm around and as you can see has sat on the windowsill when i was out and is biding her time until she feels safe.
You don't know what to do (because why push on and end up lost or in the wrong place when doing nothing just gives you time to breath).
You need to slow down because if you keep going at the speed you are you're going to injure yourself or zoom straight past the turning you need
You need more information, time or other resources before taking action (it's one of the nine steps to ensuring your goal is well formed).

This short story talks to many of the above points.

And a reason that's less logical than the others

Something else has to happen first before you know what to do (so it's more of an intuitive sense that now is not the time to take action without knowing why - ie the why is apparent only later once that something has happened - whether that something is that you've met someone, a new job appeared, you've finished another project and so on).

Here's a video sharing more about doing nothing.