The five things I do when I don't know what to do!

What do I do when I don't know what to do?

Karen Boyes posed this question to me recently via one of her vlogs.

Robert Pirsig calls these moments 'gumption traps': moments of stuckness which sap your energy, undermine your faith or otherwise cause you to falter in your drive towards completing a project.

Here are my top tips to get over gumption traps:

1 Walk away. Give myself room to breathe. Very often - when I stop actively thinking about a problem a solution will come to me.

2 Talk it over. A problem shared and all that. I've noticed that often when people ask for my advice they will relate their issue, I will listen, I won't say much and they miraculously come to a realisation about how to get themselves out of a gumption trap.

3 Relentless positivity. This involves thinking about other times I've been stuck and knowing that eventually a solution happened. Thanks to my mum, good strong positive thinking has got me out of many a jam.

4 Deliberately go back to go forward. Sometimes I've missed a vital step and I need to retrace and adjust my approach.

5 If all else fails, re-evaluate: maybe I was stuck for a reason. Maybe I was pointed in the wrong direction. This one means I need to re-evaluate this project. I guess this one is my 'don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff' fallback position.