The Space Between

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I came across an article this week that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole about thinking, processing and why some of my best ideas seem to arrive when I’ve stopped actively looking for them.

I have a rule that if I’ve spent more than about ninety minutes trying to solve a problem, I’m probably not going to solve it in that sitting and I should just stop trying to force the situation.

That doesn’t mean I stop caring about the problem. It doesn’t mean I give up. It just means I’ve usually reached the point where staring at it harder isn’t helping. In fact, most of the time, continuing to push only makes things worse. I start going round in circles, revisiting the same thoughts, looking at the same information and convincing myself that the breakthrough is just one more hour of effort away.

So when I reach that point, I tend to do something that probably looks unproductive. I’ll close the laptop and go for a walk. I’ll head to the gym. Sometimes I’ll go and sit in a cinema in the middle of the afternoon and watch a film. The strange thing is that more often than not, the answer I’m looking for appears when I’ve stopped actively looking for it.

This solution stemmed from a conversation with a good friend, Jean Gomes (who is featured on Episode 7 of the podcast), who was the one to first point out that the more you try to force something when you’re stuck, the less likely you are to achieve the outcome you want.

At the time, I thought what Jean was really talking about was problem solving. Looking back, I think it was something much bigger than that. The reason stepping away works isn’t because we’re abandoning the problem. It’s because we’re creating enough distance to process it differently. That got me thinking about where those moments of distance actually come from and why they seem increasingly difficult to find in modern life.

I recently read an article about the idea of the “third place”. If home is the first place and work is the second, then the third place is somewhere in between. Traditionally that might have been a café, a library, a park, a community centre or somewhere else you could simply exist without needing to produce anything. The article explored how difficult those places are becoming to find, particularly in large cities where almost every environment is either commercialised, crowded or designed to keep us consuming.

What interested me wasn’t the description of the third place itself, but the realisation that many of the places we think of as third places don’t really function that way anymore. Walk into most coffee shops in America, or any major Western city, and you’ll find a sea of glowing laptop screens. People aren’t there to pause. They’re there to work. The coffee shop has quietly become an extension of the office. On one hand, this is understandable because remote work has changed the way many of us live, but it does change the character of the space. It also creates an interesting contradiction. The places that should help us escape the pressure to constantly produce have increasingly become places where productivity follows us.

I don’t say that as a criticism. I’ve done exactly the same thing myself. I’ve sat in coffee shops answering emails, taking calls and trying to squeeze another hour of work out of the day. But it does make me wonder whether we’ve become so uncomfortable with empty space that we now instinctively fill it. Every queue, every train ride, every waiting room and every spare moment becomes an opportunity to consume something, answer something or optimise something.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that what I’m looking for isn’t really a third place at all: it’s a third state. A place in my mind somewhere between active work and passive consumption.

Walking often creates that state. The gym sometimes creates it. Long flights used to create it too, although I’ve realised over the years that what I really loved about being on a plane wasn’t the thinking. It was the lack of distractions. Being disconnected from the endless stream of notifications meant I could finally focus on one thing at a time. More often than not, that one thing was clearing my inbox.

The older I get, the more I value situations where my brain has enough space to wander. Not because I’m trying to force an answer to appear, but because so many of the important answers in my life have arrived when I wasn’t actively searching for them.

One of the reasons I ended up writing 12 Steps to Successful Leadership was because I eventually got on a plane and went to Japan. Although that probably sounds ridiculous and it’s certainly not a practical solution for most people - I definitely wouldn’t suggest international travel as a productivity hack. But at the time I had pages of notes, ideas and half-finished thoughts sitting in documents that never seemed to become a manuscript. Every day there was another email, another meeting, another responsibility demanding attention. The book wasn’t suffering because I lacked information. If anything, I had too much information. What I lacked was the space to make sense of it all.

Japan didn’t give me the answers, but it did give me distance. Distance from routines, distractions and from all the little demands that were competing for my attention. Somewhere in that space, the book finally started to emerge.

The same thing happened when I was trying to figure out what I wanted from the next stage of my life and career. Finding Your Purpose wasn’t born because I consumed more information. It wasn’t the result of another podcast, another book or another framework. If anything, it came from slowing down enough to hear my own thoughts. The process wasn’t really about discovering something new. It was about creating enough space to make sense of what was already there.

I think that’s one of the reasons this idea resonates with me so much. We live in a world where information has never been more accessible. We can learn almost anything, watch almost anything and access almost anyone within seconds. The problem is that consuming information and processing information are not the same thing. We have become incredibly good at gathering inputs, but I’m not convinced we’ve become any better at understanding what those inputs actually mean.

When I was drinking, stillness felt unbearable. I was always moving, always chasing something, always convinced that if I just kept going everything would eventually fall into place. Looking back, I realise how much of that was an attempt to outrun myself. Sitting quietly with my thoughts felt uncomfortable because I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the person having those thoughts.

Sobriety changed that relationship completely. These days I actively value stillness. Not because I think stillness itself is the answer, but because it creates the conditions where answers have a chance to appear. It gives me enough distance from whatever I’m wrestling with to see it differently.

One unexpected place I’ve started noticing this recently is in my coaching training. One of the hardest transitions has been learning to switch off the part of my brain that wants to solve problems. As an executive, my instinct is to listen for the answer. As a coach, my job is often to create enough space for somebody else to find their own.

What I’ve realised is that coaching isn’t really about giving people solutions. It’s about giving them something far rarer: the opportunity to hear themselves think. In a world that constantly demands action, opinion and response, there is something surprisingly powerful about creating an environment where somebody can slow down, process what’s actually going on and arrive at their own conclusions.

Perhaps that’s what we’re really missing. Not another productivity system, app or source of information; just enough space to process what we already know.

I’d love to know what that looks like for you. Where do you go when you need to hear yourself think? Do you have a third place, a third state, or some completely different version of it altogether?

Hit reply and let me know.

Eric x ​

PS. If this idea resonated with you, you’ll probably enjoy the conversations we have on the 12 Steps to Success podcast. They’re often less about finding answers and more about creating the space to ask better questions.

And if you’re currently trying to work out what comes next in your own life, 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose was written for exactly that moment. You can find it here: Amazon