Bottlenecks

You can get stuck because what’s going on inside your head doesn’t match what’s actually happening in the real world.

Let me show you what I mean. You believe you’re terrible at your job. The evidence? Your boss gave you some feedback that you didn’t really think was fair. Meanwhile, in reality, you’ve been promoted twice, your performance reviews are solid, and your colleagues regularly ask for your help. But none of that matters, because your internal story is “I’m rubbish,” and no amount of external evidence will shift it.

That’s an internal-external mismatch. It’s a gap between what you believe and what’s actually true. And it’s one of the most common bottlenecks I see people get stuck behind.

What a Bottleneck Actually Is

A bottleneck describes the place at which flow is restricted or stopped. In the context of your progress, a bottleneck is a restriction that’s having a disproportionate impact on the result you want.

Think of a single closed lane on an otherwise clear motorway. The road itself is fine for miles in every direction. But at that one narrow point, everything slows to a crawl, and the effect on your journey time is completely out of proportion to the size of the obstruction. Or think of a blocked drain: the pipework either side is perfectly sound, but at that one point, everything backs up.

That’s the thing to understand early on about bottlenecks. They have a disproportionately large effect on the process as a whole. Bottlenecks happen at critical points, at critical times, and they’re worth identifying precisely because the restriction they cause can be so much bigger than the obstruction itself.

Mental Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks aren’t just physical. A mental bottleneck can decrease your ability to grow, to move on, and to succeed at what you’re trying to do.

A bottleneck, by definition, is a narrowing. It’s where you can get trapped. It’s something that can stop you if you don’t change it. Sometimes it’s the burden of the baggage you continue to carry around that keeps you stuck. Sometimes it’s other people. Sometimes it’s simply not knowing where to apply the effort, or where to put the pressure, to break through.

For many people, their bottleneck cannot be seen. It’s invisible to everyone else, because it’s mental in nature and to do with how they think, just like the butterfly story earlier in this course, where the struggle to get free was the thing that made the escape possible.

One of the biggest mental bottlenecks I see, and where work needs to be done before a person can really turn things around, is exactly the mismatch we opened with: when your internal thinking doesn’t match what’s really going on in the outside world.

Away From, Towards

Here’s a related bottleneck worth knowing about. If you don’t change your internal world and how it’s focused, you can drift back into old ways of thinking, and one of the easiest traps to fall back into is what’s sometimes called an “away-from” mentality.

I know someone who used to define their success as not being a failure, not feeling worthless, not feeling lonely, not feeling unhappy. That’s an away-from mentality: everything defined by what you’re trying to escape. After making a small shift to a “towards” pattern of thinking, wanting success, wanting self-worth, wanting company, wanting happiness, they started seeing their goals as something positive to move towards, rather than something negative to move away from. And once their mind was focused that way, they could start doing the things they needed to do to head in that direction.

It sounds like a small distinction. It didn’t feel small to the person who made the shift. Looking back, it was the turning point they could actually identify: a mind no longer focused on what was bad in their life, but on building the changes they wanted to see.

The Mental Changes You Need

Whatever it is you want to achieve, whether it’s more money, social status, academic achievement, a qualification, or a promotion at work, you’re going to need to make some changes mentally to make it happen.

Where you’ve come from is just as important as where you want to get to. That’s what makes the journey worthwhile. But there are changes you’ll need to make along the way, and some of those will create real turning points.

Some changes happen straight away. Some aren’t easy, and take real work. It may mean making some hard choices, and above all, it usually means turning your back on some of your old ways of thinking.

The good news is that although the journey may take a while, the mental shift itself, what you focus on and how you feel about it, can happen in an instant.

Where My Bias Comes From

I’ll be honest about something here, because it’s relevant to how I write about bottlenecks. People don’t typically come to see a doctor when they’re doing well. It’s usually the other way round. They come to see me when they aren’t doing well, and that’s where most of my experience, and most of the inspiration for this course, has come from.

My bias is towards the barriers people hit. It’s why they come to me for help in the first place, and it’s why I see people get stuck in their problems more often than I see people sail through untroubled. That’s my end of the wedge, and it colours how I think about bottlenecks. It’s worth bearing in mind as you read this course generally: I see the people who trip, not the ones who never stumble.

Finding Your Bottleneck

The specifics of your journey are yours. Your goals are yours. All I can tell you is where people commonly fall down, and one of the most common places is exactly this turning point, where the internal work hasn’t caught up with the external progress.

So ask yourself honestly: where’s your bottleneck right now? Is it a belief about yourself that the evidence doesn’t support? Is it an away-from mentality that’s kept your goals defined by what you’re avoiding rather than what you want? Is it a piece of baggage you’re still carrying that doesn’t belong in your new life?

Whatever it is, it’s probably not obvious to anyone else. That’s what makes mental bottlenecks different from a closed motorway lane. Nobody can see it from the outside. You have to go looking for it yourself.

Find it, and you’ve found the one place where a small amount of effort, applied in exactly the right spot, will do more good than effort applied almost anywhere else.

Further reading

• Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. International Universities Press.
• Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow and Company.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit. Random House.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.