You're not stuck. You're thinking alone.
📸 by Daniel’s Richard on Pexels
Stuck in a spin cycle - and what actually breaks it
She’s been running her creative business for 14 years.
That’s not nothing. In the creative sector - where income is precarious, funding cycles are brutal, and most people give up long before the decade mark - 14 years is extraordinary. She knows her work. She knows her worth. She knows exactly what she wants to do next - she has a clear project to get out there and work on.
And for six months, she’s done absolutely nothing.
My client is an experienced creative entrepreneur. Sharp, values-led, deeply professional. For the whole of her creative business life she’s had a co-founder - someone she trusted completely, thought alongside, and was held accountable by.
Six months ago, her partner told her she was retiring.
What followed wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t a crisis of confidence in her work. It was grief, tangled up with a very practical problem: does she go it alone? Find a new collaborator? Is it even possible to find someone as good?
And underneath all of that, a quiet, persistent and slightly sneaky belief:
If I just think about this hard enough, I’ll get to the right answer…
My client described it as being like the spin cycle of a washing machine. That bit where it slows right down and churns the clothes around ponderously. Round and around. Then it picks up speed. Then back to slow, ponderous churning. Round and around.
The difference is - a washing machine eventually beeps. Door opens. Clothes come out.
This cycle had no concluding beep calling her to action.
She kind of knew what she needed to do. Have some conversations. But she wasn’t doing it.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, sitting with founders in this kind of stuck. The thinking doesn’t stop. It loops. It revisits. It weighs options against each other in ever-more-sophisticated ways. It mistakes complexity for progress. Sometimes it goes fast in circles, sometimes it churns thoughtfully.
It feeds on how hard it all feels.
You feel like you are putting in a lot of effort. This has got to be going somewhere?
Push on through with the thinking. Give those thought loops a little more energy to find your way out…
But thinking, on its own, can only take you so far. At some point, you need new information. And new information doesn’t come from inside your own head - it comes from conversations, from experiments, from doing something, anything, and seeing what you learn.
The reframe we landed on in our session was simple:
You don’t need to have it all figured out before you have conversations. By having conversations, you’re more likely to get it figured out.
That’s not a small shift. For someone who values independence, high standards, and being the one in control of where this goes - it can feel like giving something up. But it’s actually the opposite. Taking values-aligned action - even a small, tentative step - is how you stay in the driving seat.
It’s iteration, not certainty, that moves things forward. Every conversation she has is a prototype. Every coffee with a potential collaborator is a test. Not a commitment - a learning. The answer isn’t waiting to be thought into existence. It’s waiting to be discovered.
There’s something else worth naming.
My client had always known exactly who to turn to when she was stuck. Her business partner. Her thinking partner. The person who would never have let six months slide by without something happening.
That person was no longer available in the same way. So she was trying to do alone something she’d never had to do alone before - and calling it a decision-making problem, when really it was a support problem.
Who are your thinking partners?
Not just your cheerleaders - the people who encourage you and celebrate you. I mean the ones you genuinely think with. The ones who help you see what you’re too close to see, who ask the question that cracks something open, who hold you to account not because they’re hard on you but because they believe in what you’re building.
These might be peers, mentors, a trusted colleague. They might be a coach. What matters is that you know who they are - and that you actually use them, especially when things feel stuck.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough.
It’s that you’re trying to think alone.