For the past four days I’m posting every day on my blog because I’m participating in Wendy Kao’s Seven Day “Your Turn Challenge.”

Over 850 people are participating. I can’t say I’ve seen any of my posts on the site – except for Day 2’s entry. But I’m going ahead and submitting my posts there and here on my blog each day. You can see the results of this challenge at http://yourturnchallenge.tumblr.com.

There’s a suggested topic for each day:

Day 1: Why are you doing the Your Turn Challenge?
Day 2: Tell us about something that’s important to you.
Day 3: Tell us about something that you think should be improved.
Day 4: Teach us something that you do well.
Day 5: What advice would you give for getting unstuck?
Day 6: Tell us about a time when you surprised yourself.
Day 7: What are you taking with you from this Challenge?

Today is Day 5: What advice would you give for getting unstuck?

The best advice I give for becoming unstuck is to use the methods that have worked for me:

1. Identify your deepest fears.

2. Remember your WHY.

3. Surround yourself with doers.

4. Work with a mentor or accountability partner.

5. Create a new ritual.

6. Rocking chair exercise.

7. Take baby steps.

8. Fail first.

One of my favorite methods is the rocking chair exercise. I first saw it in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Imagine yourself 85 years old in a rocking chair looking back at your life now. What would it feel like you did or did not do the action considered?

Another favorite is a combination of No. 7 and No. 8.

To get a painting going when I’m stuck I squirt a few colors on my palette. I tell myself I’m going to make a terrible painting in the next five minutes so the expectations are very low. And that gives me the freedom to take a baby step and get a new layer on the canvas.

To me “procrastination” and “being stuck” are synonymous.

I once asked the artist known as SARK what she would tell someone about overcoming procrastination? And her response surprised me. She said maybe there’s a good reason for waiting and to procrastinate some more until you’re ready for the next step.

Which brings me to one last piece of advice to someone stuck:

9. Trust the process.

Halfway through college I stopped and worked at a busy general contractor’s office in downtown Dallas with the goal of earning enough money to get back to college and complete my bachelor’s degree.

Mr. Hayman was the owner of this thriving company that built office buildings, hospitals, parking structures, hotels, etc.

He used to talk to me in a fatherly way, encouraging me to finish college and then get a Master’s in Fine Arts rather than pursuing a bachelor’s degree in art. He’d plop the Wall Street Journal on my typewriter every day after he’d read it, in hopes I’d adopt his reading habit.

Just before my last day at the office, Mr. Hayman gave me a card with a poem that he said he had sent to his grandchildren. I still cherish it. Here’s the poem:

Bag of Tools

Isn’t it strange that
princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make –
Ere life is flown –
A stumbling block
Or a stepping stone.

– RL Sharpe

Recently, the leaders of countries that are at war with each other were photographed walking arm-in-arm for a day millions demonstrated against violence.

This made me think about all the soldiers out there fighting in the fields.

Could battles around the world be resolved at the conference table by the leaders of the fighting countries? Does peace come down to negotiating skills?

Where can we learn these negotiating skills?

What’s in our bag of tools?

I think it would improve conditions in the world if negotiation skills were part of what we learn in school.

Can we learn how to negotiate the purchase of a house, how to negotiate to reach agreement? Can we learn how to negotiate anything?

Including world peace?