Why one good idea could save your languishing career

Feeling stuck is perhaps the most common career problem. Feeling that our career is no longer flowing freely or that we are trapped somehow can be frustrating, stressful, and even depressing.

It can lead to disengagement with work, and if not checked, can lead to a broader sense of ennui that has the potential to infect other aspects of our lives including personal relationships. It is why when we feel stuck we are so hungry for ideas to become unstuck. And those ideas can be where the trouble really starts.

It turns out that we can get stuck in many ways. Being stuck in a rut very often is the trigger to do something about one’s career. It is the feeling that we are limited to repeating the same old tasks day in and day out with no sense of any change of direction, nor any challenge or novelty, just remorselessly ploughing the same furrows up and down until we retire.

It can be mind-numbing to apply skills that we mastered eons ago with no prospect of acquiring any more. Perhaps if we work on a computer, the highlight of our year is a software upgrade that changes the colour scheme or adds a new emoji to our repertoire.

We can become stuck as victims of our own success. Understandably, organisations are greedy for success, and like a two-year-old, if they see you doing something they like, they cry “again”. Just ask actors who become typecast about the dangers inherent in playing the same role or musicians requested only to play their hits.

There is a tipping point where creativity becomes automated. The actor Alec Guinness, who was famous not only for Star Wars but also for playing nine characters in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets, hated repetition.

When we are stuck, we are both in need of good ideas and vulnerable to bad ideas.

In an interview with the BBC many years ago, he explained he loved the rehearsal period – usually a month or two for theatre work, where he could create new characters and bring them to life. Once the play opened, he said the acting became like “any other 9-to-5 job”.

The actor Kenneth Williams was notorious for becoming easily bored, and by the second week of the run, would deliberately improvise material and go off script to the consternation of his fellow thespians. It was Joe Orton as you’ve never seen before, folks!