This month, I wanted to talk about something which most people can relate to in one form or another… getting out of a rut. In life, we have our ups and downs and we have the times where everything is going well and when we have things together. We also have the times when we struggle, when we seem unable to get past certain obstacles or problems and get things back on track.
So, what is a rut? Well, I always look at a rut as being a state, feeling, situation and position where you don’t seem to be going forward. You seem to be stuck in the same position for a while and can’t seem to move on and up from it. In NLP terms, we often take a noun and turn it into a verb through the process we call denominalisation. By doing that we serve to get the ability to help do something with the noun. When it becomes a verb, we can do something different. In this case, let’s take the notion of what a ‘rut’ really means. We instead term the phrase ‘to rut’ or ‘rutting’. So the question is ‘How do you rut yourself?”
Well the verb ‘to rut’ in this context doesn’t seem all that different from the verb ‘to rot’. Both involve an act where something is left stagnant. When something rots it becomes bad. In many way when we rut, we are at a worse state ourselves. So, we can therefore apply this metaphor quite usefully to the notion of rutting.
Consider what we do when something is rotting. We throw it out. Then we get something new and to prevent it rotting we keep it fresh, keep it cool and give it plenty of air. So when we are rutting, we need to throw out the bad behaviour and parts of our experience that are causing us to remain stagnant. We need to keep our behaviours fresh, cool and give them plenty of air.
So, what does this mean in real terms? Well throwing out bad behaviour simply means identifying what is it that you are doing and not doing that is causing you to rut yourself away. Once you identify that, then it’s time to figure out what you need to do to get yourself moving forward and up. You need to decide on which behaviours are necessary and what environment you need to create in your life to produce the kind of results that you are looking for.
As for keeping that fresh, cool and with plenty of air, what we mean is provide yourself with lots of space, physical and mental. We mean to keep things new and creative. We mean to keep things the way we like them. Doing things that make us feel good.
So, to avoid rutting ourselves and to get ourselves out of that stagnant lack of movement, the secret of course is movement. Yet first, we must figure out which movements we need to take and which behaviours and environments we need to create to allow ourselves to be free.
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