One of my favorite board games is a whirling dervish of resource accumulation. You use cards to gain food and food to gain eggs and eggs to gain cards and it goes around and around and it all adds up to points in the end. But there’s always a bottleneck: one part of the process that is most severely limiting the speed by which you improve your position. Maybe you’re not getting enough dice rolls to get the food you need, or the card price has increased so you need more eggs. Identifying and addressing the current bottleneck is a critical skill when playing the games of life.

Possible bottleneck clues include bad habits, observations from people close to you about your worst qualities (vulnerable!), repeated self-deception that you become aware of after the fact but you’re still going to do again, and unfelt feelings that may be both saving you from falling apart and preventing your growth. These bottlenecks are a way of describing resistance. It could be a resistance to changing, resistance to feeling, resistance to getting honest with yourself, or resistance to asking for help.

I’m an advocate for doing something different to address bottlenecks, because at the very least you gain a better understanding of what’s holding you back. What can you shift, just once, to see how it affects your position? How can you help yourself from exactly where you are here and now?

Today’s word, when combined with the (N / 5)th word in this post, forms an anagram of “banker brood”.