{"id":302,"date":"2014-01-15T12:52:30","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T03:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.finchproservices.com\/?p=302"},"modified":"2016-01-07T16:08:16","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T07:08:16","slug":"getting-mopes-blocks-stalls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/n8finch2024.local\/getting-mopes-blocks-stalls\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Through the Mopes, the Blocks and the Stalls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It happens&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The time will come in this\u00a0<strong>20 Hours Ahead Journey<\/strong>\u00a0that you stuck. You will not feel like doing the work. You will not feel like you&#8217;re progressing, and you will\u00a0<em>certainly<\/em>\u00a0feel like somewhere along the line, you made the wrong decision to learn something new, to put yourself out there, and strike out on your own.<\/p>\n<p>For me (and maybe for you), these crisis come in three different forms. Naming them helps, and being able to identify when they are happening is even better. There&#8217;s nothing worse than waking up a week or two into a\u00a0<em>mope<\/em>,\u00a0<em>block<\/em>, or\u00a0<em>stall<\/em>\u00a0and wondering where the time has gone.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>The Mopes<\/h2>\n<blockquote><p>You know what you don&#8217;t know, and that&#8217;s a bummer&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Mopes come in many different shapes, sizes, colors and severities. Basically, it&#8217;s the emotional reaction and general discouragement when what you&#8217;re doing isn&#8217;t working as easily as you&#8217;d hoped.<\/p>\n<p>These typically occur when you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>realize how limited your skillset is<\/li>\n<li>receive negative or even neutral feedback from a client<\/li>\n<li>compare your work to others in your industry and see just how far ahead they are.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For me, I look at folks that I admire in the WordPress community (specifically Genesis Developers) and think &#8220;It&#8217;s\u00a0<strong>hopeless<\/strong>. They have\u00a0<em>at least<\/em>\u00a0five to seven years on me. I&#8217;ll\u00a0<strong><em>never<\/em><\/strong>catch up&#8230;&#8221; And that&#8217;s when I get my sweat pants on, make some coffee and abandon my work because it&#8217;s &#8220;pointless&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Like Harry Potter and company training to ward off dementors, if it helps you to look The Mope in the eye and yell &#8220;<em>Riddikulus!<\/em>&#8220;, you probably should:<\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ps3cJksVMXw?rel=0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Now that we know the Mope is ridiculous, let&#8217;s move on&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>The Blocks<\/h2>\n<blockquote><p>You didn&#8217;t know what you don&#8217;t know, and now you don&#8217;t know where to go or what to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sometimes, it&#8217;s not our feelings about our work that get in the way. It is the\u00a0<em>actual<\/em>\u00a0limitations of our experience, knowledge base and resources that keep us from doing our job. Blocks occurs when you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>try something more than 7 times, just like the pros do it, and it doesn&#8217;t work for you.<\/li>\n<li>can&#8217;t get to the &#8220;next steps&#8221; in the process due to lack of information or resources<\/li>\n<li>just don&#8217;t know what you don&#8217;t know<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The biggest block I can remember was breaking a website with a little bit of PHP code, and not knowing how to fix it. In all honesty, I about threw up. I&#8217;d put a solid ten hours of work into that site, and had backups. But I didn&#8217;t know how to restore the backups (still working on finding a good solution within my range of abilities) and I didn&#8217;t know what I had done wrong (so, I might very well do something like this\u00a0<strong>again<\/strong>\u00a0and not have a way to fix it\u00a0<strong>again<\/strong>)<\/p>\n<p>Big blocks like this happen, and at the time, there&#8217;s nothing you can do about it&#8230; Unless&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>The Stalls<\/h2>\n<blockquote><p>You know what you don&#8217;t know, and that scares you a bit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You might have hit a Block, or you might be into the Mopes (<em>deeeeeeeeeep<\/em>\u00a0into the mopes). Or, like a guy with bad circulation, you might have a classic case of cold feet. Whether isolated or compounded with other factors, Stalls typically occurs when you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>get intimidated by the work in front of you (and you distract yourself)<\/li>\n<li>become nervous that people might actually buy what you sell<\/li>\n<li>don&#8217;t have the next step or two planned out (and therefore don&#8217;t what to &#8220;move on&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not always a fearless person, but whenever I&#8217;m on a cliff, and I count to three, I usually jump (so I might be an idiot too!). However, I have a huge sense of responsibility and dedication to make things that people want more than worth the money they&#8217;re paying. I&#8217;m currently sitting on a book that is 80% done. It would take me a week to finish it, edit it and submit it to Amazon&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But it sits&#8230; and sits&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>Fear: the Common Denominator<\/h2>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Oh, you will be&#8230; you\u00a0<em>WILL BE<\/em>&#8230;&#8221; -Yoda<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I believe the common strand in the mopes, blocks, and stalls overcoming us is\u00a0<strong><em>fear<\/em><\/strong>. It happens to all of us, especially the fear of losing something. That some-<em>thing<\/em>\u00a0is whatever we&#8217;ve been working so hard on. The harder we work, the greater the fear. We can fear many things happening to us:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>loss of a sale\/contract<\/li>\n<li>being perceived as an imposter<\/li>\n<li>loss of time<\/li>\n<li>making something that no one wants<\/li>\n<li>launching your product or service on the day of the zombie apocalypse (just you luck!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whatever the case, fear happens, it grips us and we freeze and back away. We don&#8217;t want to get burnt, cut or scarred.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that&#8217;s actually why you got into this whole business\/freelancing\/learning-a-new-and-marketable-skill-thing: fear that you&#8217;d lose your current job, or worse, that you would\u00a0<em>keep<\/em>\u00a0it&#8230;<strong><em>forever<\/em><\/strong>&#8230; (cue evil laugh&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll raise my hand and say that on a good day, I&#8217;m testing out this &#8220;side-gig-thing&#8221; to see if it&#8217;s actually something I can actually make a decent side income from it. And if I can get\u00a0<em>really<\/em>good, maybe it will be enough to replace mine or my wife&#8217;s income (can you see the way fear makes me cautious and non-committal?).<\/p>\n<h2>Solutions and Fixes<\/h2>\n<p>You will have to figure out what works for you because you\u00a0<em>MUST<\/em>. There are plenty of ways out of this that I have found helpful:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Quit and go back to what you know or start over with something else (I usually do this, and it&#8217;s not recommended or very much fun, but do what you must)<\/li>\n<li>De-screen and go do something else for 15 minutes (helpful)<\/li>\n<li>Admit that you&#8217;re afraid, or at least that you&#8217;ve got the Mopes, Blocks, or Stalls<\/li>\n<li>Reach out and ask someone for help (you&#8217;d be surprised at who&#8217;s will to help. I know I have been!)<\/li>\n<li>Pay for a product, service or course in whatever you&#8217;re trying to learn to accelerate your learning<\/li>\n<li>Go back and look at the log of projects you&#8217;ve already completed (or if you don&#8217;t have much from what you&#8217;re doing now, you&#8217;ve probably done something before that you can be proud of and encouraged by)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Finally, remember:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>this is a marathon, not a sprint. It is a journey, not a beer run.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Time I&#8217;ve wasted with the Mopes, Blocks and Stalls since trying to do my own thing:<\/em>\u00a0<strong><em>20+ hours!!!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the final question:\u00a0<strong>do these hours &#8220;count against&#8221; us in the 20 hours ahead project?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What do\u00a0<strong><em>you<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0think?<\/p>\n<p>-Nate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It happens&#8230; The time will come in this\u00a020 Hours Ahead Journey\u00a0that you stuck. You will not feel like doing the work. You will not feel like you&#8217;re progressing, and you will\u00a0certainly\u00a0feel like somewhere along the line, you made the wrong decision to learn something new, to put yourself out there, and strike out on your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1,10],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Getting Through the Mopes, the Blocks and the Stalls | Nate Finch<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/n8finch-site.site.strattic.io\/getting-mopes-blocks-stalls\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Getting Through the Mopes, the Blocks and the Stalls | Nate Finch\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It happens&#8230; The time will come in this\u00a020 Hours Ahead Journey\u00a0that you stuck. 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