3 Things to Remember When You’re Feeling Stuck
Feeling stuck is common, especially among high achieving women who are navigating transitions in life. Here are three things to remember when you feel stuck.
3 Things to Remember When You’re Feeling Stuck
Feeling stuck means you are at a decision point.
Feeling stuck means you are at a crossroads between two choices: staying where you are and tolerating the discomfort of your current situation, or taking a risk and allowing yourself to experience the discomfort of the unknown.
There is always a choice to be made between those two options. Knowing this can help you realize you aren’t really stuck, you just have a hard decision to make that involves discomfort either way.
2. Your Nervous System Operates on Your Behalf-without your conscious permission.
If just “thinking” yourself out a problem worked, we’d probably never have problems.
But here’s the issue I have always had with the advice of “just change your thoughts,” or “think more positively.” There are common coaching tools that say things like, “you can choose your thoughts” about everything. While this can be true for many situations, it can also be dismissive and frustrating for anyone who is having a real nervous system response.
“Changing your thoughts” requires access to your cortex, the part of your brain where reasoning and high-level thinking happens. But when you feel stuck, your survival brain, which is located in the lower part of your brain, is in charge and you won’t likely be able to think clearly. You will be in a type of “freeze” mode or “functional freeze,” which is a survival mode stress response, similar to “fight or flight.”
Being in the stress response or “freeze” mode requires nervous system regulation skills, rather than just thinking your way out of a situation. This can be especially true if you have had a history of high stress or trauma. So be aware of non-trauma informed advice that can feel dismissive and cause you to feel even more stuck.
3. There’s usually some level of shame in the way.
Shame is sneaky and very common. And it can be the #1 thing keeping you stuck. The common shame based fears that may be keeping you stuck include:
“What will people think?” (The shame of being seen as unacceptable).
“What if I fail?” (The shame of not being perfect).
“What if I’m not enough?” (The shame of being “less than”).
I have found, after working with hundreds of coaching clients that the shame based fear of “not being enough” is almost universal. Almost everyone has some variation of this, and we all think we are the only ones with this "(not so) unique shame.
So if you are feeling stuck, here’s what you can do right away to take the first step into clarity:
Ask yourself:
What discomfort am I tolerating right now that I no longer want to tolerate?
What discomfort would I have to be willing to feel to step out of my current situation into the unknown?
And after answering those two questions, you can make a better decision about which discomfort you’d rather choose. Then notice how that feels in your body, which indicates a nervous system response.
If you need help getting unstuck, or exploring a decision about a transition in your life or business, I’d be happy to offer you a consultation. You can book one with me here.