When you get hooked in a conversation, and your mind won’t stop perseverating on how to change the current situation (i.e. your inner dialogs, inner emotional turmoil, needs unrealized and unmet), how do you get unstuck and find a satisfying path forward?

The ABC’s are a good place to start: Activate Awareness, Become Curious, and Cultivate Powerful Questions. This is a game-changer for anyone experiencing that stuck place, where the inner and outer dialogs are feeling constrained, heated, or confused.

To Activate Awareness, first you must recognize that you are in a stuck place and find a way to step back and assess your mind, emotions and the situation. Mindfulness practices can assist with this process, as well as any other strategy that helps you to take a breath and step back from your current mental and emotional gymnastics.

Next, open up your mind and heart to become curious about your current experience, thoughts, emotions, and impulses to act or speak. Curiosity is a non-judgmental state of mind and heart in which you bring a sense of lightness, openness, and gentleness to explore and observe the reality of your present-moment reactivity, response patterns, and urges to act, hide, solve, or fix the current situation. Through this curious encounter with yourself and with your experience, you begin to gain insight into your patterns and automatic thought processes, thereby offering them space to emerge without taking any action or initiative to suppress or amplify them.

Once you have created the space to observe yourself and develop curiosity around your experience, the next step is to begin by gently inquiring about your own thoughts, emotions, and reactions. You can do this through developing inner dialogs with yourself, through writing and journaling, and through the power of a neutral observer who can hold non-judgmental, curious and compassionate space for you to be present and aware. This is the power of coaching: encountering your own mind and heart through the eyes, ears and heart of another whose sole aim is to assist you in growing awareness of yourself and the willingness to change. Change comes in the form of perspective, insight, and an intrinsic desire to make authentic changes in your life.